Parallax
by Xenutia
Summary: Hoshi finds herself questioning her life, her new husband, and everything she thinks she knows when a visitor wearing a familiar face arrives . . . but from where?
1. PROLOGUE

**Parallax  
by Xenutia  
**

Title: Parallax  
**Author: **Xenutia  
**Disclaimer:** One of these days I'll find a new way of saying this. I would love to write professionally for Star Trek, but until then, I'm getting some practice in for no profit. It's just for fun. And it's way off course anyway, I was getting bored of writing strictly canon!  
**Rating:** PG  
**Category:** You really need one? Oh, um . . . mystery, romance, adventure, some action, some humour, a little bit of AU . . . ack, help! I don't know. You tell me. General.  
**Codes:** R/S, A, Tu  
**Summary: **The crew once more face the mysterious Shades and the things they have created, and everything that Hoshi believes about her life, her new husband, and the events of the past year are about to be thrown into confusion by a visitor wearing a familiar face.  
**E-Mail:** sorted@witzend.fsbusiness.co.uk  
**Author's Note:** I don't know where this one came from but I do know that I'm enjoying writing this a lot so far. It's the sequel to Under My Skin', but it's also the sequel to Incentive', which confuses the heck out of me! They go in that order with this as part three. There are no episode spoilers except for one crucial tie-in to Shockwave II, and mild generic references to some season one and two stuff that you won't notice if you haven't seen them. I don't know how many parts this will be when I'm done, but I don't want to rush it. Unfortunately, I don't think this story will make sense if you haven't at least read Incentive', although you could possibly make do if you haven't read Under My Skin'. I think. Give it a go and let me know if you get stuck, okay? I'll try to explain as I go along where I can.  
**Posting Notes: **I'm going to try and post one chapter a week. I don't think I can really go any quicker than that as this is so very complicated and I'm having to take my time just to know which way is up, but I'll try to be religious about it, and update every Monday. If you would like to read the new chapters earlier, they're posted at the **Linguistics Database**, a web site for Hoshi enthusiasts, every Wednesday. Anybody that would be interested in taking a look will be more than welcome!   
  
  
  


**PROLOGUE**  


  
**parallax**/ paralaks/ noun **1** the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from different points not on the same straight line. ** parallactic/** -'laktik/ adj. (early French _parallaxe_ from Greek _parallaxis_, from _parallassein _to change, alternate, ultimately from PARA- +allos other.)  
  
**parallax**/ **1** alternation, the mutual inclination of two lines forming an angle **2** to change a little, go aside, deviate  
  
---------------------------------------  
  
_The room is unlit and unused, but through its flimsy internal walls shudders of sound reverberate into the motionless air. There is the sound of giggles forcibly muted, muffled as if a cloth has been shoved in the woman's mouth by an indignant lover. It is dark in here now, not the dark of quiet streets under a spring moon but the utter pitch of deep space where there is no glass in the doors and the only window looks out onto an empty region of near starless black nothing. It is dark and quiet but that is about to change, and when those tiny thumps against the corridor wall have inched their way to the closed doors and the giggles have dried up, this room will be far from empty, and missing the quiet. Whether the darkness will remain or not only time will tell.  
  
There is the swish of the doors and a square of solid light like one white patch on a black blanket, spilling colourless illumination onto the floor. It is broken only by two figures, black against the light, and for one bloated moment the silence holds. The two figures are motionless, looking in as the dark bleeds out. Then:  
  
Look, stop being such a fidget. Do you want me to do this properly or don't you?  
  
I'm not fidgeting. It's not my fault you couldn't say no to another glass.  
  
Well, I didn't want to offend anyone, did I? They made an effort, and they deserved our attention.  
  
Yes, I noticed you and the champagne were getting along very well.  
  
This was your idea, sweetheart, I wanted to sneak off on shore leave and find a bored vicar.  
  
And not ask the captain? He'd kill us. Well, he'd kill you. I'm just a woman.  
  
You're a loud woman. Now do you want me to do this, or don't you? Yes or no.  
  
  
  
All right then. Shut up and hook your train over your arm. Unless you want me to trip over it.  
  
Last of the great romantics. All right, I'm tucked. Go.  
  
I'm just getting my breath back.  
  
  
  
The two figures move together, sending their shadows streaming forward in new bars of grey like pillars against a sunset sky. One is clearly a woman, the passive giggler with a corner of her veil damp from stifling her laughter and a fountain of white silk tumbled over her arm. The other is the indignant lover, his angular face smeared with lipstick scars like a polka-dot handkerchief, his suit crumpled. He looks uncomfortable in it, as if his foremost thought is to get himself out of it when his mind should be consumed with the prospect of getting his new wife out of her dress. They dance around the problem in hand, weaving fabric in and out of elbows and knees until the woman resembles a pom-pom gone hideously wrong. The man is panting from their trek through the corridors, his shirt a marbled shrink-wrap as he sweats, but gamely he wedges his sleeves back on his sharp elbows, and slips his arms under her knees and around her ribs. Her face is a study of pained amusement as she watches his dark head, bent to calculate his best approach. He is so serious at times, and she has never been one to flutter at the type of grim defiance he displays as he lifts her . . . but what is life if a person can't surprise themselves, sometimes?  
  
I told you to keep that veil out of my face.  
  
It is out of your face. I know because it's in mine.  
  
In that case, it's grown. Did you feed it or something?  
  
She laughs at that, knowing he won't. Don't bump my head on the door frame.  
  
I won't bump your head on the door frame.  
  
You did when we practised.  
  
That was different.  
  
Yeah, you hadn't gone through about a gallon of Dom Perignon then.  
  
I mean I had stage fright. I'm over it now.  
  
I can see that.  
  
The room remains dark as they complete the ritual that one had thought so silly, but which now seems to have become the most important thing in the world. It will remain dark for the rest of that night, but it will not be silent. The indignant lover-turned-indignant husband gets his wish and frees himself of the starchy suit and sticky shirt, and the giggles from the misshapen pom-pom resume with vigour . . . but there are other sounds now, richer sounds, murmurs of fabric and whispers of voices in the dark, and they only descend into quiet when every other guest at the reception has long since slept, and the ship glides on into starless space, waiting for the morning._


	2. STORMS IN STEREO 1

**Parallax  
by Xenutia  
**

  


PART ONE: STORMS IN STEREO  
  
ONE  


  


Hoshi Reed had a very clear memory of her first day - and night - on board _Enterprise_, one that had seemed inevitable in all the days before, momentous as it happened, and downright silly ever since. She had never told a soul of it, not Captain Archer, not Travis, not even the deeply unconscious lump in the bed beside her, but her reluctance to abandon the little university in Brazil three weeks early hadn't been because of the kids she taught. It hadn't been because Hoshi Sato - correction, Hoshi Reed - held to her word, although she did.  
  
It had been because she was afraid of waking up in a strange bed on the first morning, with no idea of where she was.   
  
The memory of her bright, unwilling awakening to a gunmetal ceiling all that time ago returned in all its tight-stomached glory when she awoke to the sound of deep breathing beside her, the kiss of warm air on her neck, the feel of his nose pressed into her shoulder and the unavoidable conclusion that she was naked in a room she had never before slept in in her life.  
  
Oh joy, she murmured to the strange room.   
  
It had taken some inventive reshuffling and hours of room swaps, but eventually Captain Archer had organised these quarters for them - it would make him a pretty mean captain, he had said, if he made the newlyweds squash their collective belonging into a single room. Trip had kindly taken time away from the warp reactor to alter the bunk to a double, and called it an early wedding present with a grin and a wink she instinctively hadn't liked and not considered so much kind as curious. She had spent much of the night waiting for it to start vibrating or something.  
  
She twisted her neck and looked down at the dark head resting below her left ear, his hair adorably tousled, the swell and collapse of his chest pressing and releasing her side as he breathed. A part of her wished he had woken first; she imagined she might have felt a little less displaced, a little less lost in this unfamiliar room, had he been awake to tease her and tell her, with that sexy little twitch of a smile sending live sparks into his eyes, that she was beautiful when she did her panda impression. He held there was no such thing as smudge-proof mascara. But another part of her, the part that couldn't help but realise that for all his professional demeanour and his air of promise and protection she was sometimes the rock of the relationship, liked the quiet, unspoken power of just lying here, lying on her back with one hand softly strumming his spine, watching him sleep. It was nice to steal this moment and remind herself, now that every well-wisher and would-be godparent had returned to their own business and their own lives, that the overpowering ceremony and bluster of yesterday had been more than wrapping paper and a bow; that the pretty packaging had contained more than an empty box. It had contained this; new quarters, new name, new husband, new life. Hoshi lifted her head from the dented pillow and looked over the devastated tangle of sheets to the bundle of white silk lying strewn across the floor. Wrapping was part of the excitement, made the thing inside seem special, made it matter . . . but when all was said and done, it was the present a person kept. The paper and the bows, the tape and the tag, were soon forgotten. She doubted she would ever wear that dress again.  
  
She was disturbed from her idle philosophy by the trill of the comm. Hoshi ignored it. It was impossible that anyone would disturb them this morning, impossible. Whoever was on the other end must have been trying to raise someone else, and pressed the wrong button by mistake.  
  
Malcolm stirred as the sound came again, but didn't wake. Softly, slowly, Hoshi reached over his sleeping form and punched the button on the comm unit beside the bed. He murmured, and turned his face into the pillow.  
  
What is it? she slurred. In his sleep, Malcolm grunted.  
  
I'm really sorry to do this, Hoshi, but we've detected an M-class planet on sensors. It was the captain's voice, and apologetic didn't come close. It was enough to make Hoshi wonder, momentarily, if she gave the impression of being scary; but then the weight on her shoulder shifted, and she realised it wasn't _her _the captain was cautious of.  
  
I thought this region of space was uninhabitable. Something to do with residual background radiation? This couldn't be happening. It couldn't. Not when she had been only seconds away from waking Malcolm to test Trip's workmanship on the bed a little further. Not when the smell of him so close by her nose was overwhelmingly warm and woody and delicious. She had often baited him about it, teased him, told him his aftershave smelled like a spice factory . . . but secretly, she thought he smelled like home.  
  
So did we. The Vulcan Database was quite explicit. But there's something there, Ensign. I'm going to need you and Malcolm on this one.  
  
Hoshi hid her eyes behind her hand, as if that would somehow make him go away. Does it have to be us, sir? she pleaded. Our standbys are the best in Starfleet, aren't they? I'm sure Ensign Kerr is chomping at the bit to go in my place.  
  
Believe me, Hoshi, I would if I could. But Ensign Kerr broke three of her fingers in the gym this morning and no-one else comes close to you. And I figured Malcolm will be far less annoying down on the planet with us than up here worrying about you.  
  
Hoshi debated defending her husband on that one, and had all but opened her still tender mouth to do so, but she let it slide. Malcolm had never been the sort of man that would be so unprofessional as to let his personal feelings for her interfere with his duty . . . but if she had to go on this unexpected away mission, on so little sleep and all, it would be nice to have him with her in any capacity. She didn't intend to let her honeymoon be ruined completely; she didn't intend for them to be separated without cause.   
  
Can you give us half an hour? she asked, with a strangled half-yawn.  
  
Of course. See you in the shuttlebay. Archer out.  
  
Hoshi punched the comm closed and lay quite still, breathing hard at the ceiling for a long, breathlessly cold moment. Her toes felt inexplicably icy. Her lungs strained in her ribs as she counted silently to ten in one language after another, waiting for the moment when she could find courage enough to wake Malcolm and break this new development to him - carefully. Once, he had been that by-the-book young officer that cherished his duty and his job more than anything. More than her. He had so nearly made that exact decision, almost six months ago to the day - the day when whatever flimsy barrier between them had been washed away by an alien storm, their restrained teasing laid bare. They had kissed in the rain that day, and Malcolm had overcome his fear of drowning . . . but there had been more, something neither of them had disclosed in their official reports. He had been so married to his duty that he had almost robbed them of this marriage; he had been prepared to let her die for what was right. But in the end, his trust in her had won; he had learned to break the rules, and had done so when it suited him ever since. The letter of the law was no longer his guide.  
  
Hoshi kissed the top of his head, tasting a faint residue of hair gel. His hair had grown, since then, a rebellion easily concealed by the rigid styling he ritually subjected it to every morning; but it was there, and it said all it needed to. Once, he might have accepted these orders with inscrutable propriety, informing her that Trip's idea of a double bed would still be here when they got back.  
  
He would have thrown aside the mangled sheets and stalked to the bathroom to be ready in half an hour. But that, like the fear of drowning and the inability to admit his feelings, had long since deserted him. Her free spirit, that was what she called him when the world turned away. If she woke him now, if she told him what the captain had told her . . .   
  
He mumbled something into the wad of crumpled pillow, and stretched, his left arm extending outward across her ribs and tightening around her. She snuggled into him like a good teddy bear, and sighed into his hair.  
  
Who was that, Hoshi? he said against her neck, but it took her exacting ears to make out those words from the string of incomprehensible syllables he made.  
  
The captain, she replied cautiously, stiffening at the question.   
  
Malcolm hooked his right elbow under him, and raised a bleary-eyed head to her, blinking frowsily like a mole in daylight. Despite the impending argument looming on the horizon, Hoshi found herself smiling. She knew she would never tell him as much, but he looked so very adorable like this; like a little boy, and not the carefully arranged tactical officer that winked at her from his station every day. Wishing us a happy honeymoon, was he?  
  
Not exactly. She blinked prettily and arched her eyebrows in that way she knew he liked, praying last night's make-up wouldn't ruin the effect too badly. See, they've found an M-class planet . . .  
  
he said, abruptly.  
  
But . . . but Ensign Kerr broke her fingers . . . and he said they didn't have anyone else . . . She lowered her eyes, seeing a wall come down in his that warned her to say no more.  
  
I'm quite sure that out of eighty-one people - not counting ourselves, of course - the captain could find somebody to fill in. He chuckled the latter half, and the momentary coldness left him as quickly as it had come. His very blue eyes looked up at her through those startlingly long eyelashes, and the moment passed like a crackle of static on a radio. Her mother had always warned her she would end up losing cohesion at the sight of blue eyes, or green, or grey . . . the women in her family had apparently shared and handed down this same weakness for generations now, this penchant for DNA far removed from their own, but so far Hoshi had been the only one to act upon it. She was only surprised she had fallen for a brunette and not a blond, by those parametres. I sometimes wonder if this crew is made up entirely of seven officers, a dog and seventy-six sightseers. Have you noticed how it's always senior crew that get to go on away missions? Especially Trip, Malcolm mused, randomly stroking his fingertips across the mole on her shoulder. Do you think the captain's trying to get rid of him?'  
  
If he doesn't sort this bunk out later, _I'll_ get rid of him, Hoshi shot back. It's sloping on one side.  
  
That's because you're heavier than me.  
  
Hoshi thumped him. Malcolm mimed a look of pain and collapsed on top of her, laughing uproariously; a moment later she felt his teeth sink tenderly into her shoulder, and she raised a hand and curled it around the back of his neck, urging his head to stay where it was.  
  
_(See you in the shuttlebay)  
_   
Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes left no time for intensive canoodling. Oh, but . . . surely a minute or two wouldn't hurt . . .  
  
His teeth withdrew from her flesh, and he dragged himself up onto his elbows again, propped over her with an intense look of concentration on his face. You declined, I take it? The captain didn't order us?  
  
I . . . She gulped, suddenly wishing she wasn't trapped underneath him. It made avoiding his glare so very difficult. No, he didn't order us, but . . .  
  
Hoshi . . .  
  
I told him we'd do it! Just this once. And I'm sure we can make the time up later.  
  
Malcolm rolled off her abruptly, and the two lay side by side staring at the ceiling for a moment. The thirty minutes became twenty-five, then twenty.   
  
You're right, you know, he said, at last. This bunk does slope.


	3. STORMS IN STEREO 2

TWO  
  
Captain Archer was pacing his customary slow line across the deck and looking at them oddly as Hoshi and Malcolm loped into the shuttlebay - ten minutes later than promised, and in a less than professional state.  
  
No make-up today, Hoshi? Is this because you've already got your man? the captain teased; rather tolerantly, Hoshi thought, but also a little impertinently, all things considered. She set her au naturel lips into a thin line like a letterbox, and was careful to keep her head down. She wasn't about to inform her captain that she had for a brief while had lipstick on - but more had ended life on Malcolm's mouth than her own, and she hadn't seen the point in repeating the attempt.   
  
No, Captain, it's because I ran out of time. She nodded curtly and stalked past Archer with her head still down to hide her rising blush, her padded jacket pendulumning from her hand with a slow swishing sound.  
  
Archer laughed as she slammed past like a spinning top, and flung her jacket, PADD, and a water-bottle through the gullwing and into the cool interior of the open shuttlepod. Lover's tiff, Malcolm? she heard the captain chortle, behind her. As she hooked one leg over the pod's side Hoshi strained her ears to pick out Malcolm's reply, quietly enjoying the sound of her husband shuffling his feet.   
  
Not exactly, sir, she heard him explain, a little churlishly. The bunk collapsed.  
  
-------------------------------  
  
Those on duty when the sensors first isolated this one oasis of life had dubbed the planet Tut, a half-slighting reference to King Tutankhamun and his magnificent death mask. The atmosphere encircled the turquoise planet in a soft gold shroud, but below it, tiny smudges of land like milk quartz and obsidian drifted by. Apparently T'Pol had failed to understand the reference until Trip rooted out an old photograph of himself at a fancy dress party, complete with paper mache gold mask and brown body paint, and silently, Hoshi approved of the name. It seemed so much more personal than a code number, and Planet Tut mirrored the unflawed colour of the great historical treasure to the last detail.  
  
Since boarding none of the three had spoken, Malcolm piloting a little erratically and Hoshi seated with the captain at the rear of the shuttlepod. She had felt her captain's eyes stroll from her to her significant other and back again, and although he had the good grace to restrain his amusement, she could sense it bubbling softly beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to push forward. Hoshi was relieved when Tut swooped into view through the viewport, and she seized the neutral subject matter eagerly.  
  
Looks warm down there, she said, casually.   
  
Then it's just as well I didn't bring Trip, Archer replied, letting himself smile at last. Hoshi knew he wasn't grinning merely at the commander. He'd never have made much of an Egyptian, no matter how good he is with architecture. I'm sure he could build a pyramid but he hates deserts.  
  
Hoshi couldn't help but chuckle at the unexpected mental image of Trip in a loincloth. She would have to employ her feminine wiles when they returned to Enterprise and sweet-talk that photo from him. It would, quite literally, be worth the man's weight in gold.  
  
I've located a landing site, Captain, Malcolm ventured crisply from the pilot's seat. Hoshi could hear a mild species of excitement concealed in the stoic tone, but it was a trick only she knew and a note none but she would hear. To most his professional manner hadn't changed, but she could tell; what had once been acerbity and distance was now more often gentle irony or grimly-held duty.  
  
It occurred to her now, with only a little surprise, that this one of many changes had first come to her attention when she and Malcolm returned to _Enterprise_ after the mission that had thrown them both together. For some time now she had assumed that before that day she hadn't been listening carefully enough to his pleasant, placid voice or watching his perpetually nervous face to see the signs, to notice Malcolm hidden away beneath the mask of Lieutenant Reed, but now and then, she wondered. She wondered if maybe he had changed in the time she had known him. On that tense and boisterous reception six months ago he had stood to perfect attention despite the scratches and bruises that would later scar marbling his back, his head held high although his neck was cramped from that tiny holding cell, his face a passive, unresponsive blank slate . . . but instead of the dreamy half-smile she had come to expect from him in the eighteen months prior to that fated mission, his eyes downcast and shy, he had been edgy, somehow, buzzing, an electrical current pulsing beneath the surface, and when she hooked her arm in his to steady him, the muscle had been hard and tensed as crystalline rock.  
  
And he certainly hadn't been shy last night.  
  
Tut grew larger through the tinted glass in a swarm of lapis and gold as the shuttlepod banked, and with a fiendish lack of caution Malcolm brought them in to land.  
  
-------------------------------  
  
_Six months ago, a week after the escape through the waterfall_  
  
_She has rarely visited the armoury before tonight, but this is a detail she fails to remember until she is standing at the open doorway, peering into the darkness inside. She has a vague recollection, the faint certainty that she must have visited at least once or twice during her time aboard _Enterprise_ - she has an idea of what the place looks like - but she doesn't remember when or why that may have been.  
  
Of course. Target practice. It has been so long since she last came here for personal tuition that for a moment it seems as if she has never done so at all. She is an acceptable shot, these days, but her rising proficiency isn't the reason she quit - no, not the reason at all.  
  
As she ventures inside the darkened armoury, her eyes are drawn to a globe of pale light skating across the black angles of a work bench. Shadows rear and subside against that pearlescent aqua radiance as a figure moves across it and back again, casting monstrous forms on the walls, working on something that is blocked from her line of sight by his body. She creeps towards this apparition wishing she was as light on her feet as some she knows, and in an instant too sudden for her prey to anticipate, she has wound her arms around his chest, planted a kiss on his cheek, and rested her chin on his shoulder. Now two monsters play across the walls in unison.  
  
You're late. Half-past, you said. What time do you call this? She is speaking to his ear and the back of his neck, feathering the fine dark hairs there with her breath.  
  
I call it time I stopped planning my life around you. Hand me that wire, will you?  
  
She reaches down into the circle of light from his desk lamp an plucks a coil of 3mm uncoated wire from the debris there, handing it to him silently. He takes it and sets about snipping it into finger-length segments with a pair of pliers. The tiny curve of his brow she can see from this angle is furrowed with concentration, but she can tell it's feigned, artificial. There is a twinkle to his voice, a fondness, and she knows that whatever intensity he had towards the project before she arrived is now long gone.  
  
Why is it so dark in here? she asks, candidly.   
  
Still he doesn't turn. Because I don't want anybody to know we're here, my dear Ensign. I knew you were bound to turn up sooner or later. Can't keep away from me.  
  
She wallops him lightly between the shoulder blades, and is instantly mortified at the very real pain on his face and the way he draws in air through his teeth, his spine rigid and bolting straight as a mast at the impact.  
  
I'm sorry. She wishes she sounded other than she does; with her young voice those two words are hollow. She places her open palms at the nape of his neck, where she knows there are no wounds, and gently rubs away the tense knots there. I forgot. How are - were - you healing up?  
  
I was doing just fine. It looks like they'll scar, though. The doctor says that some of the gashes were too deep to grow over completely, and it was almost twenty-four hours before they got medical attention. The sparkle in his tone slips away like water from an eggshell, evaporating without a trace. The wire has fallen forgotten to the bench.  
  
She tightens her grip on his shoulders and swings him around to face her, and his brilliant eyes knock her breath back down her throat. She doesn't know how to decipher what she sees there; she only knows that it is deep as the worst of those wounds.  
  
That's okay with me, she assures him, with a grin and a nudge. They'll make you look like a pirate.  
  
He raises a smile at that; his sly, half-tilt, self-conscious little smile that reveals a flash of pointed white teeth. Long John Malcolm. I like that. Do I get a parrot as well?  
  
You get a linguist. Why would you want a parrot that can only repeat things when you could have a translator that can tell you what it meant?  
  
That's an excellent point. All right, then. Say something foreign. It doesn't have to be alien, just - not English. Pick a language.  
  
She brings her nose to his, eskimo kisses stolen in ice light, and whispers the first thing to enter her head. With his unique scent so overwhelmingly in her senses and his long eyelashes flickering as her nose tickles his, nothing will come at all for a moment slow as setting tar. Je t'aime, she obliges.  
  
The little furrow deepens in his forehead and for an instant he almost rears back from her, eyes staring. Uncomprehending.  
  
Je ne c'est pas pourquoi, she continues. But I'm getting there.  
  
He has one eye on the door as they kiss, but she doesn't mind. It is his nature to keep secrets, and it is his neck on the line if they are discovered. The deserted armoury so late at night is one of the few places they can meet and be free; when they leave for the mess hall, it will be as Lieutenant and Ensign, separate entities with nothing between them but banter and thin air. She is starting to hate regulations; he is beginning to despise them.  
  
This is wrong. He slumps back against the bench, a silhouette framed by a blue halo, and she feels the tension in his muscles slacken.   
  
I thought we talked about this. I know it's not strictly allowed . . .  
  
Try   
  
. . . but what harm are we doing to anyone? Don't get cold feet on me. Please. She snuggles closer, and draws a low moan from his throat.   
  
That's not what I meant. Hoshi . . . I'm not getting cold feet. My feet have never been warmer, in point of fact. I mean it's wrong that we have to pretend. That we have to hide. Maybe it's time I took one of those risks you're always telling me about. If I talk to the captain . . .  
  
She places her palms either side of his face and holds him steady. Malcolm, you don't have to do this to impress me. Okay? Just take one day at a time. Don't blow your career.  
  
He removes her hands, curling the fingers back under as he lowers them, and gives them back to her. I _am_ taking one day at a time. Right now I'm thinking of the next few minutes, and . . . and walking out that door like all we've been doing in here is talking target practice. And I don't think I can do it. I don't want to do it.  
  
When their eyes meet, at last, she realises that his decision is all but made. The chance of changing that now is rapidly shrinking, growing dimmer with every passing second. She feels his fingers twine gently into hers, leading her to the door. Whatever new gadget she has caught him working on is forgotten.  
  
When they leave the armoury, they leave as Malcolm and Hoshi; they leave hand in hand.  
_  
----------------------------------  
  
The warmth and the moist, misty humidity of Planet Tut only reinforced the impression of Egypt; but this was no desert. The spot where Malcolm chose to land opened onto muggy, overgrown jungle ground, and everywhere the air seethed with clinging drifts of gold vapour like oiled steam.  
  
Malcolm led the way, and directed Hoshi to walk behind him with the captain bringing up the rear. No-one objected; it was second nature to them after so many away-missions, and after being told more times than they could count or remember that security must always be first in the line of fire.  
  
As she brushed fronds of greenish-blue vegetation from her path and watched Malcolm's back as he walked, her mind couldn't help but wander. She expected the captain to begin some kind of mission briefing, some idea of why they were here, but nothing came. That, in itself, was merely unusual; but he said nothing at all, and that was downright odd.   
  
I'm starting to think Ensign Cutler would have been a better choice for this trip, she muttered, as a small centipede-like creature scuttled across her path. It'd probably be a good idea to work out what it is before trying to communicate with it.  
  
Just keep going, Hoshi, Archer responded, with a faint smile of amusement. I'm sure there'll be something to see.  
  
Ahead of her, Malcolm chuckled, and didn't turn around. She made a mental note to thank' him for his overwhelming support when they got back to the ship - maybe something along the lines of fixing his shower to COLD. She was sure Trip would help if he asked him nicely. Right after he fixed the bed.  
  
They halted at a fork in the track they followed - two clear paths were trodden down, trampled by feet into tramlines made for easy travel. So there were people here, after all. Or at least, there had been.  
  
Looks like we split up. Try and gather as much data as we can and get you two lovebirds back to the ship and back to your honeymoon. Malcolm, you take the left, I'll take the right. Hoshi, stay here, keep your comm open and wait to hear from us.  
  
Aren't you going to tell us what it is we're looking for, sir? Malcolm asked, placidly. He was calmly clicking the energy cell of his phase pistol into place as he spoke. All right - so maybe she wouldn't fix his shower, after all.  
  
If I could, I would. T'Pol's scans showed an indeterminate number of biosigns concentrated in this area. She also found residual energy signatures, but they were off the chart. I can't say I'll forget this morning in a hurry - it's not often you see T'Pol flustered.  
  
Hoshi nodded, and contained a tiny smile; T'Pol had looked pretty flustered the night before when she caught the bouquet. So it's basically a case of looking for something that moves and not shooting it, Hoshi interceded. Think you can manage that, Mr. Reed?  
  
I'll do my best, Mrs. Reed.  
  
Archer looked from one to the other a moment, obviously enjoying the banter, his helmet brow creased into three lines like a crow's foot. I wouldn't worry, Hoshi. It's not like he hits anything when he does shoot.  
  
Malcolm remained perfectly demure throughout, but the soft glint in his lowered eyes reminded her to be cautious when taking her own shower tonight.  
  
Take care, you, she said, on a breath, as Malcolm secured his phase pistol and looked up.  
  
And take care, you, he replied, apparently without emotion . . . but she knew better. She wanted to take that tiny step forward, and lay a kiss right on his cheek where the muscles had tightened; but again, with the captain watching, she knew better.  
  
She watched until both had vanished from view, one to her left and the other to her right; then, with a sigh, she sank down on a fallen tree root, her communicator open on her knee, and waited.  
  
--------------------------------------------------  
  
_She has been asked - no, asked is too polite a word, she has been ordered - to wait in the mess hall, but if she knows one thing about herself, it is that no boyfriend of hers is going to order her around. Technically this boyfriend has the advantage, being her working superior . . . being a lieutenant. But that doesn't change her basic nature; it doesn't change the fact that as he gives her that quiet direction with a touch of his hand briefly on hers and heads away from her to the captain's ready room, she is worried sick.   
  
He hasn't found the courage to tell her yet, but he has received a video letter that changes everything. Or maybe it changes nothing. Maybe this has been on the cards all along, hiding behind his stare. He is too afraid to tell her, too ashamed, but she knows anyway. She overheard as she came to his quarters last night to meet him for dinner, not meaning to break his shell of privacy, not meaning for her sensitive ears to take in things not intended for them, but she heard, and she knows how badly it has affected him. His sister Madeline has just been promoted to professor of archaeology and in the space of that one very busy month has got herself engaged - to a Navy man, no less. His father reported the news under a guise of wistful celebration, but she knows how much more was left unsaid, branded between the lines in invisible ink.   
  
Invisible ink is drawn out by heat. Drawn out like poison from a wound. Her darling ambitious lieutenant is going into the fire.   
  
She waits at the back of the bridge, making a play of tying her boot laces whenever another crewmember passes her. It is the night shift, and the bridge is all but empty.   
  
She can hear voices inside, but no words, and maybe that's just as well. Even so her restless mind insists on filling in the blanks, and that is far from desirable. She knows how it will start. Only time can tell how it will end.  
  
A patchwork of long minutes passes, like water chasing bubbles down a drain. The water sucks quickly away and yet the scuds of foam seem to linger endlessly, swirling in a circular vortex that takes forever to leave. This is like that, units of sixty seconds stitched together to make a chain, one bright and elusive as their overheard voices drop, the next grey and painful as they raise again. It's a joke, really, that she should be so nervous - her darling ambitious lieutenant has stormed into enemy ships, armed and ready, he has withstood mental battles of will with beings too alien for any of them to comprehend, and here she is, twisted into a complex labyrinth of knots over his discussing something with the captain.   
  
Correction; he is discussing _her_ with the captain.  
  
At last, the voices fall completely silent. There is no thunderous catalyst, no yelled order for the matter to drop . . . both murmurs of muffled sound through the door simply drift away. They have nothing more to exchange. The doors glide open and he emerges, his back a little stiff and his shoulders like rock; but his head is held high, and she knows that everything is going to be all right.   
  
Come along, Ensign. I believe we've made a dinner date.  
  
He heads for the turbolift with that artificially snooty invitation left for effect, and she follows him with a shake of her head and a vague memory of being kissed in the dark._


	4. STORMS IN STEREO 3

THREE  


  
The long and the short of it - not that she was casting aspersions on his height or anything - was that Archer had been unwilling, but reasonable. He didn't make the regulations, after all. One thing had been clear, and every day for six months they had held to it, faithfully, understanding the import behind the smallest gesture; they must never display so much as a flicker of attraction while on duty. Malcolm flew close to the sun as he threw her a wink from tactical every morning, but if the hawk-eyes of the bridge crew had ever noticed it, then they pretended they hadn't. Nor had they noticed, or drawn attention to, her answering blush.  
  
In public, they held their distance, an awkward remonstrance but a necessary evil, the knives they walked on as a price for having legs. In private, Malcolm slowly allowed his outer defences to crumble, and a sort of reverse adolescence took place; his smiles became more frequent, his jokes less dry, his eyes reflecting the changes both. He never spoke of his past, the last vestige of the old Lieutenant Reed clinging like those proverbial scuds of foam, but this she allowed him, unable to press for what he couldn't give when he gave all else so freely. At night after dinner they often sat on one of the long couches in the observation lounge, and when the people had crept away to their beds or their night shifts and the entire deck hummed with a restful, blue-lit peace, he would slip his arms under hers and clasp her loosely around her middle, and she would rest her head back on his shoulder and lay her hands over his, and they would gaze out at the expanse.  
  
Once, about three months ago, she had glanced down and noticed a fine white scar around his wrist, and her fingers had swept over it lightly. That he had allowed, with a gentle smile that made her toes curl . . . but she had made the mistake of asking him where he had got it, and how, and as he batted her hand away waspishly his eyes had clouded over into a dull misty steel. Aged lead from an old and weathered cathedral roof never looked so black.  
  
She left it alone, and never asked him again. She never mentioned the scars on his back, carved into him by the metal shrapnel of the crashed alien land vehicle. She never looked too hard or too long at the tiny network of fine white lines by his mouth; she simply kissed them. She snuck her hands under his casual shirts when they were off-duty and stroked his back as he had once stroked hers in the rain. And once, under the pretence of admiring his watch, she had got a good look at his wrist.  
  
But it ended there.  
  
Alone on her fallen tree-root and lost in her pointless mental ramblings, Hoshi touched the communicator lying open on her knees, and debated taking a risk. A calculated, minor risk, but a risk nonetheless.  
  
She raised the little box to her mouth, and hesitated. She should hail both men first, and if the captain didn't respond, then she could assume his communicator was switched off, and she would be safe to speak to her husband. If both responded, she could pretend it was a routine check-up. Either way, if she was careful, she should be all right.  
  
This is Ensign Sato. Please report. Can you see anything?  
  
There was the customary crackle of the comm line in way of a reply, and Hoshi unknowingly held her breath until she could be sure of who was going to respond. The temporary break in contact, that endless, empty second when she was completely cut off from any human voice, frightened her for some reason she couldn't quite comprehend.  
  
Sit tight, Hoshi. No sign of anybody yet. It was Malcolm, sounding bristly' as he so often did when his senses were trained outward into potentially hostile terrain. But he also sounded amused, and that was as good as sending up a flare - he was open to talking, if the coast was clear.  
  
She waited for the captain to come in, but he declined. She and Malcolm were alone on the airways for now, at least. If they kept it light and on this local frequency, they were free to talk.  
  
I think Trip rigged the bunk on purpose, she said, cautiously. His idea of a practical joke.  
  
I wouldn't put it past him. How about we fix his shower?  
  
Hoshi smiled, gently, and ran her hands lightly over the plain gold band on her finger - the only jewellery she was permitted to wear on duty, and, in truth, the only piece she would want to. She had never been one to deck herself with finery, but she had to admit, she did like jewellery on men in the right circumstances. Especially, she thought, biting her lip, those little black shoestring chokers. Malcolm would look fantastic in one of those . . . but she had long since abandoned any attempts to force more than his watch and his wedding ring onto him. For all his advances in confidence over the past six months, he was adamant about that, and likely always would be.  
  
Great minds think alike, she replied. She sounded so much more blithe and accepting than she was, than she even knew _how _to be. So jolly, so gung-ho. _I want to be on this little field trip_, her tone said. _I don't want to be out there in the black of deep space and cuddled up to the cutest little armoury officer Starfleet ever produced. I'm not sitting here in this heat, alone, wishing I was up there toasty and snug with Britain's greatest export. Uh-huh.  
_  
She kicked a loose stone across the path, and frowned. Are you still there, Malcolm?  
  
His answering laugh rattled over the comm like a pebble in a tin can. I'll let you know if I'm going anywhere, Ensign.  
  
Ensign. Such a little word and yet it encompassed her life.  
  
It had taken her far longer than it should have done to realise that when he called her Ensign' in that special, purring way, he meant so much more.  
  
Copy that, _Lieutenant. _See anything at all?  
  
Non. Il fait chaux, though, and not in a good way.  
  
She smiled again. He had tried so hard these past few months to learn French from her, and though his accent sounded like an untuned violin in an orchestra he had made very good progress; his sweet nothings were often a whispered tangle of exotic Parisian that sent a shiver down her spine. He would slip into it as they sat watching the stars stream by from the obs deck, and she would deliberately fall silent, and listen. She would let him talk, those hushed words placed directly in her ear in that quiet voice of his, and didn't even correct him when he accidentally told her he loved running his hands through her castle. After all, _chateaux_ and _cheveaux _were an easy mistake to make.  
  
she murmured, affectionately. In exchange for the French, Malcolm had subtly taught her some English. _Real, _common as muck English. The stuff that wasn't taught in public schools. The stuff that would make his mother blush and his father . . . well, although he alluded to the reaction being unpleasant, she wasn't exactly sure _what _his father thought of it. He spoke about his family so little, and only Madeline had shown any foreknowledge of the wedding, or even that they had been engaged for the past three months. Hoshi had never spoken to his parents.  
  
There's nothing here, Lieutenant,' she said, at last. Why don't you come back? I'll try to hail the captain.  
  
There was no answer. And this time, the sound of no dogs barking was a thousand times colder.  
  
  
  
Far away, muffled by the distance and filtered dead by the dense carpet of undergrowth, but seeming to split the greasy air like a knife through smoke, she heard a deep, thunder-like rumble, and the sheer momentum of it vaulted through the ground at her feet and sent her sprawling from the tree-root onto her knees. Then it echoed away into nothing, and there was only the clinging drifts of golden haze clutching at her with slippery fingers, and the silence, and the click-click-click sounds of tiny insects in the jungle.  
  
Malcolm! Captain!? she screamed into her comm, and again into the air, in the direction of that monstrous noise. The silence swallowed it and left only intermittent birdcalls in its place. Come in. Malcolm? Are you there? Captain? Anybody, can you hear me?  
  
It was the captain's voice, sounding as urgent as hers. What was that? Can you see Malcolm? Are you all right?  
  
I'm fine, captain, but I can't reach Malcolm. I heard this noise . . .  
  
I heard it too, Hoshi. Stay where you are, I'm on my way!  
  
With the sickly sheen of that warm, moist haze cooling on her skin and streaming into her eyes, Hoshi jammed her communicator into her pocket, snatched her phase pistol from another, and ran in the direction of that enormous, tectonic disturbance, as if the ground itself screamed in sympathy with her.  
  
If Malcolm was anywhere near that sound, then even the captain wasn't going to make her stay put.  
  
------------------------------------------------  
  
_Three months ago_  
_  
The obs deck is especially silent tonight, which is unusual, except for one lone figure curled sideways into a corner of the long couch looking out over space, which is even more unusual. Malcolm Reed has always been such an early bird, such a creature of immaculate habit, until she influenced him for the worse. Now she knows without a second thought where to find him when he disappears and midnight is fast approaching - abandoning his latest gadgets and inventions, sometimes filling up the corners with a peanut butter sandwich and sometimes not, he will always be here, either stretched out languidly enjoying the sheer pleasure of having nothing more important to do, or scrunched into this exact same corner with his back to the couch and no chance of anybody sneaking up on him. On those occasions, there is nothing of that contented glow about him, and the only pleasure comes from a whisky glass set on the table to one side. He doesn't tend to have the sandwich and the whisky at the same time. When she falteringly suggested it, once, he called her a Philistine, and matter-of-factly bit into his sandwich. She declined a bite.  
  
She has no chance of approaching without him seeing her or hearing her long before she reaches him, so she calls in advance, hoping not to startle him, letting him know it is her. She only has to say his name - he does the rest.  
  
I'm here, Hoshi, he says, just as he always does. It sounds weary, but she tries to pretend that is nothing more than exhaustion - he has been working long shifts for some weeks now. Nobody knows why.  
  
You okay? she asks softly, and he pulls his feet up to give her space to sit - away from him, at the far end of the couch. She gingerly balances herself on the edge, and forces a smile._  
  
_I'm about as right as a turkey that's just caught the farmer looking at him. With a box of stuffing in his pocket.  
  
Out of respect she doesn't laugh; only smiles sadly, and almost reaches out to smooth her hand over his thigh . . . but she doesn't. When he wants her to touch him, he'll let her know.  
  
Bad news?  
  
It's fine, Hoshi. His tone says quite clearly, and very bitterly, to leave him and his news alone.  
  
She isn't biting. Malcolm . . . Travis said he saw you reading a letter earlier today. You were white, he said. Well - whiter than usual. He said you could give Marley's Ghost a run for his money. What's happened, Malcolm?   
  
He sighs and the fisted hand resting on his knee uncurls a little - not much of a sign, but a sign, nevertheless, that his resistance is already failing, so soon. Feminine wiles can outthink even the best of armoury officers. "I did have a letter arrive, this morning. It's nothing important. These things rarely are."  
  
"And the reason you're killing yourself working? Is that nothing important, too?" she prompts gently. He gets that cold look in his eyes and she lets her questions fade away, withdrawing the hand she has tentatively extended, snatching it back from the dry ice in that stare. But she waits out this storm, knowing his pattern; with so many others, with _any _others, he turns this silent killer of a glare on them, and they leave him and his trouble alone. But she knows it won't last if she stays . . . and she knows that she is the one person he will finally allow to see that resolve fall, if she will only sit him out and let the idea ferment in his mind long enough. _I'm here, Malcolm_, her body language whispers, and the longer they sit staring at the stars and daring glimpses at each other the more she can feel him accepting that, his muscles loosening slowly like an unravelling ball of string. _I'm here and I'm not going away. So get used to it. _  
  
At last there comes that one look she has been waiting on, the placid curl of his lips at one side and his head tilted to one side, and he extends one arm to her, asking without the words he finds so very difficult. She slides along the couch and into the circle of his arm and it tightens around her, pulling her in close to his side. His foot is sticking into her hip, but she doesn't care. She is just glad that he trusts her enough for this. They sit silently for a moment longer, watching the steady wake of warp travel as it trails by like white party streamers in a black breeze.  
  
"Madeline's husband got promoted. He's a captain now." It is a murmur, and she can almost imagine that he is doing it on purpose, hoping that she won't hear and he will be let off the hook. If it weren't for the fact that she knew he was aware of her phenomenal hearing, she would be tempted to think so; but as he surely realises, she hears him easily.   
  
She nods, and lets her fingers skate over his chest, tucking her hand inside the open neck of his uniform and making contact through the thin black undershirt. He growls contentedly a moment, almost too softly for even her to hear, and it becomes a sigh before it leaves his throat. Finally, he is relaxed, and Hoshi congratulates herself silently on her talent. She does it every time, and is deeply flattered by his willingness to let her take control like this. In her experience, traditional men like Malcolm could be so prickly about strong women sometimes. She can only say she is the lucky one; she has landed the black sheep of the Reed family line.  
  
"That's all?" she presses.   
  
"Isn't that enough? Ray is Mr Navy, you know that. Jumped from one rank to another without stopping in any one long enough to look at the scenery."  
  
She says nothing. He will come to the point in his own time; asking any more questions will only make him shut himself off again. She lets her head drop onto his shoulder, and waits for him to continue. In his own time, he does.  
  
"He doesn't say anything," comes his soft, idling voice, laced with a dreamlike quality she recognises, if only from rare acquaintance; he is deep in thought, perhaps barely even aware that she is there at all. "My father, I mean. But it's there, you know. If you how where to look for it. To anybody that didn't expect any more than a civil enough update - family news, trivialities, that sort of thing - it would seem perfectly fair. Same as any other letter from home, if a bit distant. But when he says he's pleased for Madeline . . . when he says that Ray will feel right at home in the Reed family . . . what he's really saying is that I don't belong. He says he's happy for Maddie getting hitched and all the time he's telling me I should be married by now. Before you know it she'll be giving him his first grandchild and that will be another nail in my coffin. But there's been so many other things to do with my life till now . . ."  
  
She squeezes his arm, gently, and turns her head where it rests to look up at him. He feels her move and returns the gaze, tearing his eyes away from the stars. Already she knows that's all he's going to give, and this far more than she had ever come to expect from him; far more than she's likely to receive again. "If I didn't know we were already engaged," she said, with her most charming grin, "I'd think this was a very underhanded proposal. And I'd probably think I was a convenient pawn in your little contest with Maddie for first grand kid."  
  
He kisses the top of her head, and his answering smile suddenly beams out like a flashlight switched on. "Never. You know me better than that."  
  
"Lucky me," she retorts. But deep down, she knows something is wrong.  
  
She knows that Malcolm hasn't told anyone about her. Not his mother, not his sister . . .   
  
. . . and, most importantly of all, he hasn't told his father._  
  
------------------------------------------------   
  
She crashed through the matted veil of turquoise vegetation and fell to her knees into an unexpected clearing, pulling sharp air into reluctant lungs like a tug-o-war team claiming the rope. Gravel bit into her outstretched palms and into her shins even through the brushed twill of her uniform . . . but she barely noticed that complex dot matrix of pain. What she saw in the next few minutes swept everything else from her head.   
  
The captain was struggling viciously in the mulched carpet of blue-green leaves with what looked like a human man. As she watched the pinned Archer flipped the stranger over his head, and the stranger swept out one leather-booted leg and kicked the captain's out from under him the instant he stood. Hoshi snatched her phase pistol from her pocket and trained it on the scuffle with shaking hands, waiting for a window of opportunity, but she didn't dare shoot. She had no guarantee she would hit the right man, and every chance she would hit neither.   
  
"Stay back, Hoshi!" Archer yelled, before she could do anything else. "Don't shoot!"  
  
Leaves scurried in the heavy golden air, kicked up by the two fighters; the eddies hovered in the syrup-haze as if floating on water, the atmosphere buoying them up in balletic swirls and rushes around the one cyclonic centre - her captain and a strange man, knocking seven bells out of one another. Hoshi could only watch, helpless and unable to shoot, as they punched and kicked and parried and ducked back and forth, sometimes taking a fall, sometimes dodging clear. Blood streamed from a skin wound in the captain's temple and the stranger clutched his left arm tight against himself, as if it were injured in some way. His loose dark hair had shaken forward over his face, and his clothes were of no design she had seen before, but she was certain the man was human. Medium height and build, quick as a jaguar, graceful as those flurries of leaves crackling lightly down to earth on the dense mist. He was good. He seemed to anticipate, even before Archer moved, what the captain was going to do, where he feinted or dodged, which hand or leg may strike next, and avoided them with the ease of a trained dancer choreographed for the piece. Loose, discoloured white shirt sleeves tied at the bicep with threadbare rags and billowing out to the cuff concealed whatever damage may have been done to his arm; but that left sleeve was stained an ugly, brilliant scarlet, and as she watched tiny drops pattered to the ground. The sight of the blood caused Archer to hesitate, and Hoshi had her phase pistol trained on the man before another move could be made. But in the second it took her to steady her treacherous hands and take aim, the man had pulled a weapon of his own, and pointed it straight at Archer.   
  
"Don't shoot, Ensign," Archer gasped, not taking his eyes off the stranger dripping pink, bloody sweat into the earth. "Don't shoot. Not yet."  
  
"Captain, why . . ."  
  
"Just trust me. Don't shoot. I want answers and we're not going to get them if he's unconscious."  
  
Never taking his weapon from Archer, the strange man with the wounded left arm laughed, a light, breathless chuckle that ricocheted on the air like the laughter of a madman bouncing from padded walls, and drove a million icy little needles into her flesh like the stings of tiny, poisonous bees.  
  
She knew that laugh.  
  
Then the man raised his free, injured hand and swept the curtain of greasy hair away, and she knew just _why _she knew it.  
  
It was Malcolm.  
  
It was Malcolm, and it was not.  



	5. STORMS IN STEREO 4

FOUR  


  
It was Malcolm. She told herself it had to be, because any duplicate or hologram or . . . whatever . . . would almost certainly be an identical replica. A carbon copy, made to look and sound and move as much like the original as any replacement could do, to take his place exactly and infiltrate his life. At least . . . so she had always been taught. So she had come to expect, the moment it dawned on her in that awful scratchy slow-motion, that the laugh she heard was his, even though it couldn't be. She had held that remote possibility, that this was a hologram or an android or any of the other myriad impossible technologies she had read about, and in its own way, it had made her feel brave when she first heard that awful chuckle so like her husband's. She had been so certain that it would be the one or the other. Or a practical joke. Or a mistake.  
  
Never, in her wildest moment of blind instinctive panic, could she have envisioned this.  
  
It was Malcolm, and it wasn't. The similarities in him somehow seemed more alien, more unreal, than the differences.  
  
It was _his_ face. It was his square brow and his straight nose and his oddly drawn cheeks; the high, proud cheekbones and the scarred mouth. His elegant neck. Enough, more than enough, to make the man staring back at her Malcolm's identical twin. But the eyes that glanced querulously between the two of them were like lightning on a muggy day, and brief glimpses of a deep, almost luminous violet flashed from below his typically lowered eyelids. Five times brighter and more powerful than even Malcolm's brilliant eyes had ever been. Quicker. Deadlier, although she dismissed the thought as it came. Malcolm had always been deadly, in his way, and she had known it. Whoever this man - if he was a man - was, he only failed to mask it so cleverly as her husband did. Every braced muscle in his body quivered with tension, the glare cutting through her as it glanced to her and away. Her presence seemed to agitate him. Whoever he was, he looked almost . . . _afraid_ of her.  
  
"H-Hoshi?" he stammered, and the voice that emerged from those familiar lips was his, to the last tiny hitch in the final syllable as he said her name. The way he said it on those days when he couldn't believe she was his. She said nothing. She couldn't.  
  
He appeared to gather himself almost at once, and shook the too-long hair back from his forehead and from those penetrating, inhumanly violet eyes. He let his left hand fall, limply, at his side, and a thin stream of red like a scarlet ribbon wound its way down his wrist and along the curve of his thumb until gravity pulled the drops to the ground. He was shaking, and the hand that held the weapon trembled violently.  
  
"Who are you?" Archer demanded hotly. Hoshi might have been impressed at her captain's unusual mastery had she been in any presence of mind to take in more of this freakish circle than what her eyes could see - after all, Captain Archer was the only one of the three not armed. His phase pistol remained securely tucked into his uniform.  
  
"And where's . . ." But she couldn't bring herself to finish that question. Asking it, making it tangible, was too much like admitting that something had happened to him. Whoever - _whatever_ - this being was, she was convinced he wasn't any more than a surface copy - a lookalike. She had only to look at the high boots bound with string around the calf and the billowing sleeves tied with dirty rags to know he had not come from earth, and had little to do with Starfleet. The unkempt hair and the thin bluish smudge of stubble beginning on his cheeks and jaw indicated that if he had ever been in any way affiliated with a military faction, that affiliation had long since ceased. She knew as sure as she knew her own name that Malcolm would never neglect his grooming like that. She had never seen him with stubble, except for the one time he had been . . . dead.  
  
She wouldn't let that thought go any further. Not now.  
  
Could Malcolm have a twin he had never thought to mention? There was so much even _she _didn't know about him, so much. And it was the only conclusion which made any sense, regardless of logistics. Regardless of the fact that no twin could be here, in this system, farther than any human had travelled before _Enterprise _arrived.  
  
He turned those electric eyes on her, and in every flinch and every twitch of his cheek she could see how much it cost him to do even that - to look at her. It had to be a twin, had to be, and nothing but a DNA test would convince her otherwise. Surely only a flesh-and-blood human man could look so . . . so devastated. But then . . . but then, surely only Malcolm _ever _looked at her that way.  
  
The haze pawed sickly at her skin and everything began to blur into a muggy coloured mist of shapes and movement; blackness closed in around the kaleidoscope until those blurs had shrunk to a single eye-hole like a knot in a wooden door . . . then she was falling, and felt arms catch her deftly before she hit the ground.   
  
------------------------------------------------  
  
_Six months ago, the night after the escape through the waterfall  
  
They have seen nothing of each other since their return to _Enterprise,_ and maybe that is to be expected, and in some mad, indefinable way, for the best . . . she has reassured him, as best she can, that there is no ill will, that she can't hold his decisions in that bunker against him . . . but there are moments . . .  
  
. . . there are moments, rare and dismissed as they come, when she can't escape that nagging, undeniable fact. He almost let her die.  
  
Twice now she has thought of visiting him in his quarters, against Phlox's admonitions that the lieutenant needs to sleep off the effects of the gas, but both times, something has held her back. Maybe an outsider would assume she was unsure of her feelings after that indescribably fantastical first kiss, that maybe she had been swept away in the atmosphere of the moment and had it been Trip, Travis, anyone, it might have played out the same. But she knows that isn't the case. She has never been one to make decisions quickly, never one to assert those choices . . . but this time she knows her own mind. That isn't why she hesitates outside his door now, the third and most committed time; that isn't why the bag in her hands nearly shakes out of her grasp and spills its hard-won contents across the corridor. She knows the attraction is only stronger now that she has been away from him for a day, dwelling on what has happened. But that one doubt won't go away, and she knows it never will, if she doesn't ask him. If she doesn't turn it out of its locked closet and into the open for them both to see.   
  
She rings the door buzzer, and waits to be invited in. Maybe he will be asleep still, heavily sedated until his back is healed and the gas bled from his system by hours of outward breath and heavy sweat. Maybe she will be let off the hook, so the saying goes.   
  
"Who is it?" comes a groggy voice from inside. It is muffled, as if he is speaking into his pillow.   
  
"It's Hoshi. Can I come in?"  
  
She expects him to say no, and it is only now that she realises that. All along she has been worried that she won't know what to say, linguist or not - it is only at the eleventh hour that she is forced to acknowledge she may not even be given the chance.  
  
"Of course. The door's open."  
  
That strikes her as odd for such a deeply private man, until she takes a moment to think it over from all sides. Of course; after being locked in a tiny cell for all those hours, cramped and helpless and sealed away from the outside world, the idea of being trapped again must be more than he is able to face. The idea of Malcolm Reed scared is still a strange one, although she has seen it, on occasion. She saw it on that wild hillside as the ranks of silent black figures closed in on them. When they plunged beneath the lake to hide. When he gave himself up for her.  
  
And, long before that, when he stepped into decon to rid himself of alien cells invading his blood._  
_  
It is dim in his quarters, the lights half-lowered and the air cool, even a little chill. Again this almost strikes her as unexpected . . . but then she remembers how stifling, how hot, that cell had been, and she understands. It reminds her of movie night, on those rare occasions that she has been . . . except that there is only one figure in the dark. She can see his paler shape in the bunk, the blankets and sheets twisted around his legs and his head rested in his cradled arms. She is right about the muffled vibrato of his voice; it is only a marvel he hasn't suffocated himself as he sleeps.  
  
He half-turns and raises himself on his elbows as she comes in, and she hesitates once more, unsure if she should go any closer. Unsure, desperately so, whether he would expect her to come any closer, and just what their relationship is.   
  
"I brought you some chestnuts," she murmurs, and he gives an awkward little half-smile in return. Her stomach flips a little at that smile; he doesn't allow many to see it, even after so many months onboard._ "_I_ _thought . . . well, I suppose it was my idea of a joke."  
  
"Noted." That smile is fixed in place like the knowing, ambiguous grin of a cat that may purr or else scratch her eyes out at any moment. He looks almost contented, if in a little pain. He is wearing a ship-issue blue t-shirt under the sheets, but even through the cotton jersey she can see tiny flecks of crimson like red eyes seeping through where his wounds have rubbed, and let a little blood into the fabric. That crashed vehicle had really torn him up, and he hadn't said a word in the shuttlepod returning to _Enterprise. _How he managed to pilot it under the dizzying influence of that gas she will never know, but she takes a silent vow now to learn how to pilot one - you never could tell when her ability to fly a shuttlepod may be needed again. And in her humble opinion T'Pol, the only other member of the senior staff unable to pilot a shuttlepod alone, should think about it too. Maybe she could convince Trip or Jon to give the Vulcan lessons._  
_  
"You look rested," she says, carefully.   
  
"Being unconscious for sixteen hours straight will do that to you."  
  
She rolls her dry lips together and casts an eye about his austere quarters, noting the mirror on one wall and the painting of the _Enterprise _beside it, the fastidiously neat shelf where his toothbrush and razor are kept, and the trophy she has never thought to ask about before today. It makes her sad in a way she can't explain - there should be more than this, photos of his family and his home, personal affects, those little things that have meant something to somebody, that are enduring echoes of the experiences gone. But there is nothing, and even his chess board is tidied away, out of sight. Just like the man himself, she supposes; the best parts are hidden away behind a blank exterior, and when he wishes he will bring them out, like the chess board and the card deck and his tantalisingly sexy red shirt. But it takes a special request to see those things, the little bits of Malcolm Reed that paint the real picture over the blank canvas.  
  
"Was there something, Hoshi?" he asks, suddenly, and although she can't see herself she knows the colour has mantled on her cheeks and burned the coffee skin there a brilliant red like bloated rose petals in the full swoon of their growth. She can't hide her disquiet, not from him; just as he can't hide his own from her, despite his gentle smile.  
  
"The captain has noted a commendation in your records," she ventures, having calculated this piece of news carefully to placate and even soften him. She knows his secret drives, his ambitions - it should please him, at the least, to think that Starfleet will recognise his efforts, and at the most it will reassure him far more definitely than she ever can that he has done his very best, and come out the victor.  
  
His eyebrow tweaks upward, and for an instant she wants to ask him if he has been taking lessons from T'Pol - but she doesn't. There are more important things to be said. "I don't see that there's much to recommend me," he says, a little offhandedly. "Not if we both stick to the story we agreed on."  
  
Her silence says it all, or maybe too much. He shifts his weight on his elbows, leaving two clear dents in the bunk where they have been resting, and turns his head fully to her. She notices he doesn't move his torso, as if it is too difficult for him . . . and she wonders, knowing she won't have the courage to ask, if he is injured more badly than she at first thought. "Hoshi?" he presses. She lowers her eyes. "Ensign. What did you tell him?"  
  
"What you told me to," she stammers. "We stopped to take a look around, got caught in a storm, and found shelter till it cleared up. We were captured by aliens who held us for a day or so and then let us go. We don't know why."  
  
He studies her as a jeweller inspects a diamond, searching for flaws, anything which may condemn it. Condemn _her. _Those aqua-lit eyes with their hint of grey are like laser surgery; they divide tissue from bone and bone from marrow. She shuffles her feet noisily, unable to meet them and not cave in.  
  
"I see," he says, with that thoughtful, deliberate patience she knows so well is false, and brittle. A warning sign. "What is he commending me for? Finding a good tree to stand under?"  
  
"Malcolm . . ."  
  
"Don't 'Malcolm' me, Hoshi. You don't use my name once for months on end and then suddenly start peppering your speech with it? This is official business, Hoshi. Please remember that."  
  
"You just used my name twice in as many sentences!" she retorts.  
  
He lowers his eyes, at last, and one hand curls around his pillow and twists the corner fitfully. It as not as casual as he makes it out to be. "That's different," he mumbles.  
  
"How is it?"  
  
"Just is." He is playing the petulant little boy now - a state so much more genuine than his false patience, and so much warmer than his clinical anger of a moment ago. Somehow when he loses his temper she can never quite believe he's in control of it . . . but this teasing species of flirtation is one he has perfect mastery over, and something she can believe, and understand. "So what did you tell him? About my dashing heroism, I mean."  
  
She smiles, and sinks down on the edge of the bed beside him. He obligingly makes room for her to perch. "That's it's not so dashing and calling it 'heroism' would be applying the word in its loosest sense. But seriously? I told him enough. Not about . . . what happened, or what didn't happen, in that bunker - and not about what happened in the forest, either, before you give me that look - but I told him how we had to hide from them. You remember? In the lake."  
  
"Remember?" He snorts. "I'm still having nightmares about it. Sixteen hours of them to be precise."  
  
She nudges his elbow with her hip, her hands wrapped around one knee. "See. Heroism. And I told him about the dashing part - about you dashing into danger to be a decoy for me. We both got captured anyway, he knows that . . . but that doesn't change it." She hesitates, looking down at him thoughtfully, tracing the line of his nose and his jaw and the curve of his mouth with her eyes, amazed at the intensity of his returning stare. He looks almost coy gazing back up at her, the dim lights casting nets of shadow through his long eyelashes and into the sockets. It should look spooky. But the idea of Malcolm Reed being coy is just too funny to find anything about him spooky tonight. She has something more to say . . . but this is hardly so pleasant as the first piece of news, and she doesn't know how. "Lieutenant, would you . . . would you have done as they asked, if I hadn't . . . if the EM barrier hadn't been operational, or I hadn't been able to tell you? I'm sorry to bring this up again, Malcolm, but . . ."  
  
"Hoshi—" There is that hitch in his voice, that one she never expected to hear from him, but which has only become more frequent as they got to know each other. The way his throat fails him when he says her name that way. "Hoshi, please don't ask me that."  
  
"Why? Because you don't know?"  
  
"Because the answer is no, Ensign." She stops dead at the return of his anger in that sudden cold statement, knowing it isn't aimed at her. He has turned his flushed face into the pillow again and gingerly she reaches out, and rests her hand on the back of his neck. His pulse is pattering frantically under her hand, and that in itself is a miracle; for someone so defensive, so paranoid, as Malcolm, allowing her to touch that most vulnerable artery is the surest sign she has of his changed feelings toward her. All she needs, in effect, to know that he won't push her away again.  
  
"I just had to know, Malcolm," she says, gently. "That wasn't an attack, it was just a question. I told you I don't know what I would have done. It's not about you. I don't blame you for wanting to do your duty, I just had to know. You can understand that, can't you?"  
  
"I hate my duty." He spits the words into the pillow like gunfire, and doesn't turn back to her just yet. "I hate having to always do what I'm told is right, what everybody else thinks is best for me. I joined the Navy because it's what everybody else wanted, what I _had _to do. But it wasn't what I wanted. I'm sure you can see that judging by . . . well, what happened." With a viciousness she hadn't expected from him he twists his head suddenly, and she gasps as she realises why his voice has been sounding so blurry, so unsteady in his throat. His eyes seem so much bluer when they are holding back tears. "It never is."  
  
She reaches up, ever so slowly, and grazes the back of her knuckles down his cheek. The touch is as tender as her tone is exasperated. "It might be time to change that. Grow a backbone and decide what_ you_ want to do. Now do you want these chestnuts or not?"  
  
He sniffs, and his odd, breathless little chuckle bubbles up again before he can stop it. "You're beautiful when you're angry, you know."  
  
"Malcolm! Of all the old, ridiculous clichés in the universe . . ."  
  
"I'm traditional, Ensign. Apparently, anyway."  
  
There is a silence, and for all the prevaricating, she feels she has got her answer. He is looking at her with such fervour as it goes on that she begins to fidget, embarrassed by the attention, secretly drinking it in. T'Pol never got stared at like this. No, siree.  
  
---------------------------------------------  
_  
The starry blackness and scattered flurries of light passed almost before they had taken hold - she had not fainted as she feared she would, had only faded out and lost her grip on consciousness for a second or two, and for that, she was grateful. Now was no time to act like a spineless little girl, not matter how sudden the shock.  
  
As the shimmering, viscous air and glossy turquoise flora of the clearing came back into focus, Hoshi felt a hand brush softly across her brow, smoothing the escaped hair from her face, and another clasped at her ribs, the arm it was attached to circling her back. It was all that kept her upper body from the ground, and had broken her fall.  
  
The captain must have been quick as a snowball downhill to reach her so fast, and catch her like this before she fell backward into the drift of crackling skeletal leaves. He had been some three metres away and yet . . .  
  
Hoshi choked the thought dead as her still tenuous grasp of reality solidified like jello in a mould. Though her ears had always been her sharpest sense, her crowning glory, the remainder of her senses were far from dull, and her sense of smell especially so. The scent that surrounded her was scrubbed and natural, free of that spicy/woody aftershave now sitting in her new bathroom on _Enterprise, _but never could she mistake the honest smell of skin and sweat and testosterone beneath it, the smell that came so clearly to her now. The hand stroking her brow slowed but did not subside entirely, although her hair was firmly brushed away by now. The skin was a little rougher, the fingers a little calloused, but she knew that touch as well as her tongue knew the shape of her own teeth.  
  
She shuddered and tried to start away, everything that had led up to her collapse slamming back in like a rip tide . . . but her limbs were weak as damp paper and she could only fold back into the pleasantly muscular arms supporting her, and try to remember to breathe.   
  
"Step away from her," she heard the captain say, very slowly, and there was a dry crunch as he took a step towards them. She strained to focus on the direction of that sound and saw Archer, closer than she remembered but still a good two metres away, and she felt the muscles in her mysterious catcher's arms and chest harden instinctively, then lower her gently, so very gently, to the ground. And as he scrambled away she swore she heard a tiny gasp in his throat, and something like a muted, hasty apology, so barely murmured even her discerning ears almost let it go.  
  
She forced herself to snap out of the aftershock, and dragged herself upright, squinting against the light. She felt a little bit concussed, which was ridiculous. Everything was moving slowly, in a fluid, underwater way.   
  
Archer was beside her in an instant, his eyes never leaving the third of their mysterious party. He extended a hand absently to her and helped her to her feet, and she accepted, her face a fiery, anguished red. She could tell from the way her dry cheeks burned and felt so tender to the touch.  
  
The man that looked like Malcolm and smelled like Malcolm and whose touch was his only so much more wistful and reverent had backed away on his haunches and was crouched, poised and coiled like a cornered dog, a couple of metres away. His eyes were lowered and the long black lashes flickered now and again, concealing that impossible colour beneath. Otherwise his face was almost morbidly still, cold and unmoving as marble. She had seen that look, too, a hundred times or more; but she was not used to seeing it from him anywhere but the far corner of the obs deck couch and without a glass of whisky in his hand.  
  
She waited, for once unable to speak, and was more grateful than she could ever hope to communicate when the captain asked her question for her - the one that had been pressing in the draughty corners of her mind like a broken bedspring in her back all along, and which had to be asked, and soon. Should have been asked already, if she had not been such a predictable weakling, and caused a scene like that.  
  
"Where's my officer?" Archer barked. He stooped and with one hand always free and his eyes fixed on his target, retrieved Hoshi's fallen phase pistol. He handed her his scanner and she stared at it, dumbly.  
  
"Scan for biosigns. Especially human," he ordered her, quietly. With trembling hands, she did. But she already knew, in her heart, what she would find.  
  
Three. Only three. Herself, the captain . . . and this man that defied every rule of physics she had ever learned.  
  
"Well?" the captain repeated. Those violet eyes flashed upward, in a moment almost too brief to see, and his gaze alighted on her with that moth-wing sensation she knew so well; when her Malcolm did that, she could read his mind behind every flicker.  
  
She stopped dead, and the scanner nearly fell from her numb hands. All at once, she realised what she had unwittingly just said to herself.  
  
_Her _Malcolm. She had called her husband _her _Malcolm. Already, on some level, she believed what her eyes told her, and not what her head insisted was correct. This stranger was Malcolm Reed. He just . . . wasn't _her_ Malcolm Reed.  
  
"You can relax, you know," she heard herself saying, in a voice remote and intangible as the horizon and untethered from her vocal chords, somehow - she couldn't feel them in her throat or taste them in her mouth, only heard them at the same time as the people she spoke to. "He won't shoot."  
  
Archer looked sideways to her in surprise, but she didn't repeat or negate the statement, and he didn't argue.   
  
"But you have to answer my questions. And I'll know if you're lying, believe me. Deal?"  
  
He hesitated a moment, his stare darting from her to the captain and back again. He had dropped his weapon to catch her - a sacrifice she would be a fool to ignore - and had little choice, she knew, but to agree. He nodded, slowly.   
  
Hoshi sank to her knees in the snapping mulch, bringing her eye-level to his, dropping the scanner in her lap and holding her hands out a little, away from her body. "I'm not armed, okay, and I expect you to do the decent thing and not go for any other weapon you might have hidden in those sleeves. The Malcolm Reed I know wouldn't dream of it. So if you're who I think you are, you won't, either."  
  
Behind her, Captain Archer had fallen silent. She couldn't see him but she assumed he had kept his phase pistol steady, as a precaution, because she saw the bright eyes look briefly over her shoulder to him, and then settle back again. He hadn't backed away as she knelt, and that was a start. She felt almost dangerously light-headed, sick with nerves, and her back was an icy river of sweat under her uniform - but she had to do this. Delirium would just have to wait.  
  
"Why did you attack the captain?" she asked, softly. His face gave away nothing the captain would see. Nothing a security team on _Enterprise _would hold him accountable for. He looked like a child caught planning something good, only to be falsely accused of quite the reverse. The one time that she had seen that look on Malcolm Reed, three months ago now, he had asked her to trust him. He had a surprise for her and she must either trust him or spoil it all.   
  
She had brought her hands in and touched her wedding ring before she even knew what she did. "Okay. All right, okay, not the best place to start." She sighed, and tried again. "Can you tell us what you're doing on this planet?"  
  
He huffed, as scornful a laugh as she had ever heard even from an Englishman, and they were quite renowned for it. He stole a look at the turquoise sky now amassing a shroud of marine-hued rainclouds overhead, and she followed his gaze, both spellbound and on her guard. "I was hoping you could tell me. I assume . . . I assume you know who I am?"  
  
"I know who you look like. But that's not the same thing. Is it?" She watched him carefully, hoping to startle something incriminating, hoping to see something she could dislike or distrust, and needing to see it . . . but again, she was disappointed.   
  
"You tell me. Things aren't always what they seem," he replied, with that gentle laughter. And his eyes stole, very slightly, over her shoulder again. "I know who you are, Ensign. I know that you're the youngest of a large family and I also know that the _Enterprise _is in orbit waiting for you to return. I can name every crewmember down to the captain's dog. And if you scan me you'll see I'm very much human. Because that's what you were thinking, isn't it? That I might be a hologram, or a clone of some kind. Maybe a shapeshifter. Stranger things have happened at sea."  
  
As he stared without guile into her fixed, questing eyes, his soft, breathy voice skipping over her nerves like rainwater, Hoshi found that as uncomfortable as seeing his face under different hair or feeling him touch her with rougher fingers was, she could look back at him. Because his eyes were altogether alien from the ones she knew. They met hers steadily and if either of them flinched, then Hoshi feared she may have been the one to do so.   
  
They were _his _eyes. So different, so changed, and yet, still his.   
  
"Malcolm," she whispered. "I don't know where you've come from but if you know anything, anything at all, then please tell me. Do you know where . . . where the Malcolm Reed I know may have gone?"  
  
Something sharpened in his face and turned the usually kindly lines into scored granite. She had seen children look that way when their mothers told them the antiseptic wouldn't hurt, that little bite of wounded trust that hurt more than the pain itself. "If you are Hoshi Sato and if . . . if you're anything like I remember . . . then you won't push me to tell you anything that's not mine to give. You say that you know somebody with my name. I can only assume we have something in common. If that's the case, then you'll understand how careful I have to be. You'll accept that I can't tell you, just yet. Maybe never."  
  
Archer spoke up for the first time since this interrogation began. "You're not going anywhere until you do, Mr Reed. Unless coming back to my ship under guard qualifies."  
  
Hoshi stood, her legs unwilling to support her - and although her instinct was to turn on the captain and emphasise just how fiercely certain she was, she couldn't look away from the tensed figure in front of her. "He'll come. You don't need to restrain him."  
  
He nodded, but he looked unsettled. Even . . . scared.  
  
She could count how many times she had seen Malcolm Reed scared on one hand. It was only one of the things she loved about him. But she checked herself, hard. This may look and sound and in every physical way correspond to her husband - but it wasn't him. The man she loved with such fierce pride was missing in action. Wherever he was, she knew he was no coward.  
  
"I appreciate your opinion, Ensign, and I'm sure you're right, but I'm not willing to take that chance," Archer returned, grimly. Hoshi's phase pistol had not relaxed in his hand, even after the threat of attack had apparently passed. "Those bindings on his arms. We can use them to tie him, just till we get back to _Enterprise. _Take this." He held the phase pistol out to her, but their prisoner darted backward, and the heat pouring from his altogether vicious stare startled her. His wary eyes never left Archer.  
  
"No," he snapped. "Her."  
  
Hoshi nodded. Softly she crept towards him and although he cringed, like a kicked puppy seeing a bad master coming home, he remained where he was, and allowed her to untie the rags holding his sleeves in check. She tried to be gentle as she loosened the strip from his injured arm, and tried harder still not to notice the blood seeping through his shirt in twisted, tangled streams . . . and when she bound his hands behind his back, she was careful not to pull the knots too tight. She thought she saw gratitude in the unreadable mask he wore, but she couldn't be certain. Of anything.  
  
She stepped back from him and Captain Archer gestured with the phase pistol for him to walk ahead of them. He obeyed placidly and with startling grace. Hoshi fell back, and when the captain halted with his brow furrowed deeply in inquiry, she could only swallow.   
  
"You did good, Ensign."  
  
"Just keep that man away from me," she spat. "I'll do my bit, sir - but keep him _away _from me."  
  
Archer nodded, and walked after their prisoner into the beaten undergrowth that was the path. After a moment, putting as much distance between herself and them as she could, Hoshi followed. The storm broke as they left.  



	6. THREE LITTLE WORDS 1

I'm going to take a few seconds to answer some questions that were (probably rightly!) asked in the reviews. Thank you for the reviews, by the way! The parts in italics are supposed to bridge the six months between Incentive', my last long fic, and this one. They're there to hopefully shed some light on events leading up to the wedding that has just taken place in the prologue. Plus, some of this will be relevant later! The scars and the waterfall escape are both references to Incentive', so if you haven't read that, some of this may not make sense. The thing about the letter and Malcolm's sister will hopefully make much more sense as we go on . . . I'm planting seeds and just seeing what grows, I guess.   


  
PART TWO: THREE WORDS  
  
FIVE  


  
Hoshi kicked her feet petulantly at a twist of blankets wrapped around her right foot; if she could have seen herself she would have thought she looked like Porthos dreaming about cats. Her leg wrenched violently and flung the covers aside, uncovering her to the hip, and peevishly she reached over with one arm and dragged them back again, lamenting the loss of the warm patch she had made with her body's flushed imprint. She felt cold at her toes and too hot in the head - and diving under the sheets until only the top of her head peeked out on the pillow no doubt didn't help matters - but she wanted to isolate herself. It was the only way she could think. It was the only way she could keep functioning at all, and not give in to the kind of mental shutdown that hovered a little below the surface like a sleeping shark in shallow waters.  
  
_He's not dead._  
  
The captain had quietly insisted she try and get some rest despite her worries, and that he would keep the sensors running until he found something. That he wouldn't give up the search until he did, and that Malcolm would be joining her in no time. All she need do was keep the bed warm for him. She knew it was all they could reasonably do, at least until the lightning storms on Tut had flared their last, but still she felt that lying here under an avalanche of sheets was a betrayal, somehow. That she should just take a shuttlepod and trawl that jungle, alone if she had to, until she found him. She should tread and retread every inch of that insect-infested, snake-ridden ground if it would help, in the rain, in a hurricane if need be. He would be soaked and freezing and no doubt more than usually colourful about his complaints when they picked him up, but that wouldn't matter - that would burn itself out like a damp fuse, like the storms themselves, the moment she got him back to their quarters. If a hot shower didn't knock the rougher corners from her grouchy darling lieutenant, well, then there were other ways of warming him up. Ways that used less of the ship's resources and a lot more of hers. The bed was busted, but warmed or not, the bed needn't factor into the equation.   
  
She smiled to herself, and curled her knees up to her chin like a sleeping cat on a rug. Being the first marriage to take place onboard a Starfleet vessel had its definite advantages; the novelty was still so new that she could get away with murder. None had dared disturb the honeymooners last night, or would dare to do so the next time they closed that door to the world. They had kept their side of the bargain, and professionally held their distance - their private time was their own so long as their duty never suffered. It had been as difficult as this before, each pretending the other's welfare mattered no more than any other crewmember's, but they had survived it. She could survive it again.  
  
It was as their guest had said to her: _He's not dead._  
  
She had always known there would be risks involved in a relationship like this; and at last, she understood a little of the captain's initial reticence. Malcolm had never mollycoddled her, never allowed any illusions about the danger they faced every day, and in time, she had learned not to doubt his warnings. She should have been prepared for this.  
  
She wasn't.  
  
-----------------------------------  
  
_If those three words are to mean so much in her future, then the three words he whispers to her one night as they keep their most-nightly vigil on the obs deck matter more. They sit as they always do, he squeezed into the far corner of the couch and she nestled in the crook of his arm, and on this night it is the peanut butter sandwich he chips away at so conscientiously. Occasionally he pauses to take a bite before placing it back on its plate on the side table. So far it has lasted him an hour and a half, and counting.  
  
"All I can smell is peanut butter," she announces, and wriggles a bit.  
  
"Sorry, I'm sure."  
  
"It's horrible."  
  
"Better not kiss me until I've brushed my teeth, then."  
  
"I wasn't going to."  
  
She twists herself comfortable and he looses his arm demurely a moment, letting her settle. "Nice to know where I stand," he says, completely deadpan. They lounge in companionable silence a moment while he quietly demolishes the remainder of the sandwich.  
  
"Malcolm?"  
  
He grunts in acknowledgement, and craning her head backward she sees he has his mouth full.  
  
"Have you noticed anything funny about the captain recently?"  
  
He swallows, and stares off into space a moment. "He has sent Trip on a lot of away-missions alone recently. Is that what you mean?"  
  
"Maybe. He's sent Trip practically everywhere on his own and us . . . well, he never sends us anywhere together, does he?"  
  
"Can you blame him? Look what happened last time."  
  
She pedals her heels a little against the rumpled couch, and pouts, hoping to elicit some sympathy from him. He is in one of his facetious moods, she can tell. He will deflect her gradually more intimate banter with these lifeless, dry comebacks, his spine rigid and his face devoid of any and all expression . . . but then he will break into that smile, that wickedly wonderful smile, and stoop over her and imprint his warm lips on her forehead with a laugh that shatters all his former blandness into scattered shards. With that kind of payoff in the offing, she is willing to wait out this little phase.  
  
"He can't hold that against us forever. I mean . . . I can't help but feel a bit overlooked, sometimes. I do have legs, you know. I can walk. And thanks to somebody not a million miles away I can fire a phase pistol pretty straight now."  
  
"But could you fire it at me again?"  
  
It is so soft and so unexpected that her brain stutters like a broken engine, attempting to convince her she hasn't heard him say it. She flounders wordlessly for only a moment before he saves her the humiliation, and continues.  
  
"He told me right at the beginning that he wasn't ready to allow any personal feelings to jeopardise the crew. Think of some of the life forms we've met, Hoshi. Things that can take over a human being, things that can use us as leverage to get something they want . . . things that quite literally stop at nothing. If your duty called for you to sacrifice me for the sake of the crew, could you do it? As easily as you might any other member of the crew?"  
  
He squeezes her tightly in both arms in the wake of this, letting her know he expects no reply. He must know, as she does, that there is nothing to say to something like that. Once she had shot him . . . but could she do it again, now that things have changed?  
  
She twists in his lap, and looks awkwardly up at him, suddenly shy. Is he smiling? There is a slight curve to his lips, but in such a way that she can't be sure. His eyes are deep and dilated in the dim lighting, as dark as the ocean he loves and hates so much. Contradictions swim behind them. He almost let her die, once. She knows what he is saying, and what it falls to her to do now. She barely recognises this young woman that has made a life for herself in space, that expected to teach and to one day meet some quiet intellectual that would understand her work; maybe somebody that owned slippers and liked to take his dog for a walk. Who is this confident Ensign discussing the dangers of deep space with a man best known for blowing things up?  
  
"So you're saying he won't put us in that position. Is that it?"  
  
He leans over her and presses the kiss she has expected since this conversation began squarely between her eyebrows. "Bingo." He brushes her hair idly aside, and she wrinkles her nose, embarrassed and flattered in one fell breath. "The captain made me promise him we wouldn't let it affect our work, Hoshi. Keeping us apart in these situations is his way of making sure we don't have to."  
  
She sighs, and her toes kick again. It is getting to be a habit.  
  
"So yes, " he says, finally. "I _have_ noticed the captain behaving oddly. But I know why he has to. It's something we have to accept, Hoshi. That _you _have to accept." He shifts, and now he is looking firmly into her eyes, caught in his grasp so that she has no choice but to meet it. "I want to make a go of this, Hoshi. You have no idea how much. But . . . but if we do, you have to know that it won't be easy. We're not like other people. We put our necks on the line every day, me more than anyone. If you let me, I promise you I'll make it as good as it can be. But it's not safe, Hoshi. "  
  
She says nothing to this revelation, so serious, and so sudden. She can't.  
  
He pulls her closer, and plants another kiss, this time on her mouth. "It's not safe."_  
  
------------------------------  
  
Hoshi rolled over on her back, nudged down the covers, and stared at the ceiling. It was no good, lying here like this, waiting for news. Much as she could understand the secrecy the captain had chosen to bring their new house guest aboard under, it had put her in a unique position, and one that left her utterly unable to do anything but what she did. She understood his reticence - her own experience of Starfleet and the Vulcans matched the captain's, if only vicariously - but that did nothing to make this inactivityany easier. This _waiting. _The only shred of empathy and faith she had managed to find had been from the one person least qualified - and least expected - to give it. The man that had sat so placidly wearing her husband's face on the journey home had done what her captain could not.   
  
He had said nothing on the way back but three little words. Three words, when he should have been pleading his case, making threats or explanations, attempting to convince them that he would be no danger to them. If she could have studied him on the way back, waited on his expression and poise as her captain did, it might have made sense of his silence. It might have qualified those three words and his puzzling acceptance of everything happening around him, like the still heart of a cyclone. She had never seen a man so saturnine - and that beggared the question, all over again, if he was even a man at all.   
  
Those three words were all that Hoshi needed to hear; perhaps they were all he needed to say.  
  
_He's not dead. _  
  
She wanted to believe him. She _did _believe him, but it was neither the words themselves nor the whispered sincerity of the claim that made her feel that way; she believed that her darling ambitious lieutenant wasn't dead because he wasn't the type. He had been in more life-and-death situations than any of them, and come out unscathed. Even when he _had _died, when she had felt the life slipping from him by her own hand and seen the blood and warmth flooding from his pale face, he had come back. She had once asked him what had made him fight so hard that day almost a year ago now, the day that she had shot him; he had buried his nose in her hair and said that he had a lot to live for.  
  
"He'll be all right, Hoshi," Archer had said from his seat at the rear of the shuttlepod. Somehow he failed to convince her. Her own captain had failed to convince her, when three words from a stranger had drawn out her trust at the drop of a pin. Archer had asked her to pilot them back to _Enterprise_, and she knew why he had done so. She had been grateful for the monotony, for the routine of procedures and controls. They, at least, had been the same as on any other day.  
  
"I know, sir," she had replied.   
  
"It's just a matter of running a sensor sweep for his biosigns and beaming him up. We'll have him out of that storm in no time. Boy, will he be mad."  
  
She nodded, evasively. He was most likely holed up in a cave somewhere, waiting for the storm to pass before contacting them for a pickup. Crewmembers had been out of contact for far longer than this without undue cause for concern. The scanner must have been wrong, maybe due, in part, to the weather's interference. Nothing worked properly when it was soaked.  
  
He'd be okay.   
  
It was only as they neared the shuttlebay that any of them spoke again; even Captain Archer had refrained from firing the questions she knew he wanted to, and had merely sat in grim silence guarding their guest until the yellow docking lights of the ship's underbelly flooded into the shuttlepod's tiny cabin. Archer had ordered her to take them in, but not to open the doors until he gave the word. She had done so, and sat in stunned silence, waiting for him to say something further. Looking back, she recognised that shock, that pervasive, wordless apathy, for what it was; grief. She had not allowed herself to see it, because grief meant she was not nearly so certain of her husband's safety than her outward demeanour would allow. She couldn't be feeling anything but slight worry and a little impatience because all this was was a change in plan. Nothing more. He was just late. And the captain was right - he would be mad when he got home.  
  
Having his perfect double staring so fixedly at his stained old boots did little to settle her. The inarguable equation existed, and it would be foolish to deny what was sitting right in front of her; her Malcolm had vanished as this one had appeared. It didn't take a genius to figure out the two incidents were almost certainly related. But this couldn't physically _be _him, even considering the unique possibilities of time travel . . . he would have said so, he would have laughed and explained just how he came to look so different and what had happened to his uniform. To his eyes. His hair. He would be treating her as his wife, and Archer as his captain. He would have looked at her in that hungry way of his, letting his eyes skate over her every curve, a grin spreading slowly across his face.   
  
This man was afraid of her, and afraid, even more, of the captain. He didn't look at her that way because he didn't look at her _at all. _He sat with his powerful eyes cast down, but watchful under the lowered eyelashes. There was something about the subservience that she could not wholly believe in.   
  
"Hold on, Hoshi," Archer had commanded with a raised hand, as she reached for the gullwing hatch controls. "We need to decide what we're going to do with him."  
  
Hoshi swung the pilot's seat around sharply to face them, and palmed her still-damp hair smooth against her scalp. The clasp had held as they dashed to the shuttlepod in the sudden downpour, but barely. "What do you mean, _do _with him?"  
  
"I mean we can't just march in there claiming that this is a double. He'd be snatched by the Vulcans for scientific study before our feet hit the deck. No, we've got to get him onboard without being seen. Keep this to ourselves."  
  
"How . . . how do we get him through decon, sir? You know Doctor Phlox likes to see us back on board personally. It makes him feel needed." But in the back of her mind, she had been thinking that as important as this mystery man was, as right and comforting as the captain's intentions were, this conversation was inherently _wrong. _They should be more concerned about their missing crewman, they should be planning a search, a sensor sweep, a rescue party. They should be down there, looking for him.   
  
Now.  
  
"Doctor Phlox is expecting three people in decon when we open those doors. You, me, and Lieutenant Reed." Archer cast a sideways glance at the silent third member of their return party; the object of it remained unmoved. "Does this look like Lieutenant Reed to you?"  
  
There was a flicker of those lowered eyelashes and a flash of brilliant violet beneath. Except for them, for the hair and the outlandish clothes, he looked like their armoury officer in every way.   
  
"Captain, we have to report Lieutenant Reed missing, we have to get a search team down there!"  
  
"I'll take care of it, Hoshi. I haven't forgotten Malcolm; but we have a problem that needs to be dealt with any way we can. I've never heard of anything like this before, and I don't know how we're going to explain it in the end. But until then, I want to keep our options open. A few weeks back I had Trip reroute some of the controls for the sensor grid through to my ready room in case of emergencies. I can run a continuous sensor sweep from there until we find Malcolm."  
  
She subsided meekly back into her seat, her grip unconsciously tensing on the armrests and boring ten tiny holes into the padded vinyl. She had seen Captain Archer take on entire governments for the sake of one captive crewmember, had seen him mount rescue missions the like of which had not been seen on Earth for decades . . . she had to trust that he could and would do the same again. He hadn't lost a crewmember yet - and she could tell from the sound of his voice and the crease in his forehead that he didn't intend for Malcolm to be the first.   
  
"He doesn't look exactly like Lieutenant Reed," she complained, a little petulantly. "Phlox'll notice."  
  
"There's spare uniforms in the locker back there. We can hide those clothes."  
  
"His hair's longer. Not by much, but it's longer."  
  
Archer reached over the back seat and snagged the water bottle she had carelessly thrown in earlier today, little expecting for it to be of any use. It seemed like lifetimes ago. Lifetimes best forgotten. "Phlox will know we got in a storm down there. T'Pol would have handed any planet side data on to him to run us through decon, and he'll expect us to be wet. You know what happens to hair when it's wet?"  
  
Hoshi gulped back a sour bolt of disbelief that crowded her mouth. It felt like swallowing her own heart whole.   
  
"His eyes," she choked, ineffectually. "His eyes are different."  
  
Archer smiled. "Leave it to me, Hoshi. I'll take care of everything. You don't have to worry. Malcolm's tough. He'll be okay."  
  
_He's not dead.  
  
_And the captain _had _taken care of everything. Phlox had not suspected a thing - his only comment had been a slight concern for Hoshi's own elevated heart rate and increased perspiration levels. She had blamed it on the excitement of the day before, and be it by the sheer innocence of her big blinking eyes or merely lack of evidence to the contrary, Phlox had believed her. He was still reeling with the distinction of being the first Denobulan to witness a human wedding, and perhaps his mind wasn't on the task in hand.  
  
He had believed all of them. After all, he knew Lieutenant Reed's medical history better than anyone; why should he question the hay fever attack the third member of the away team returned with? With his hair soaked against his scalp and his eyes tight closed against imaginary allergies, their visitor had looked one hundred percent like their armoury officer. Archer had half-carried and half-dragged him into decon, his battered old clothes exchanged for a spare uniform, and she had to admit their guest had put on an extraordinary show without question or complain of their methods. He had splashed water in his half-closed eyes to make them stream and sneezed convincingly throughout their brief scan for contaminants. Phlox had been content to administer a mild antihistamine and order him to bed to sleep it off.   
  
The doctor hadn't seen what happened next. He hadn't seen the captain march the 'lieutenant' to Malcolm's old quarters and seal him inside. He hadn't seen Archer fetch a security lock from the armoury and bolt it on. But she had seen. The captain didn't know, but she had seen.   
  
And she couldn't help but know, in her heart, that their visitor was no 'guest' . . . but a prisoner.


	7. THREE LITTLE WORDS 2

SIX  


  
She could barely recall the many, many times that she had hesitated outside this fastened door, often locked, a thin skin covering nothing but silence. For somebody whose chief enjoyment in life was explosions, Malcolm Reed was an unexpectedly quiet man, and placid, and despised excessive noise to a fault. He had headphones which would occasionally turn to a good use and blast some frightful old rock 'n' roll into his ears, but never too loud to blot out the things beyond. There was precious little point, he had argued, in inventing a tactical alert if he didn't keep his ears pinned back to listen for it.   
  
She had merely cast a demure, loving look at his oddly pointed, nicely positioned ears, darted forward like a gull scooping fish from the water, and bit his left earlobe.   
  
Hoshi Reed pressed her fingertips into the sockets of her eyes, urging them closed, and let herself feel the breath twist its way into her lungs and out. What she was about to do was a court-martial offence, a direct violation of her captain's order, and the first thing she had done in her life that might constitute a crime . . . but some things were too important even for rules. Her captain was acting in ways she couldn't begin to assimilate, and by rights T'Pol could forcibly take command from him and would no doubt sanction what Hoshi was about to do; but that didn't help. She, Hoshi Sato-Reed, the golden girl of the senior staff that could do no wrong and that never acted out of the bounds of reason, was about to become a criminal.  
  
She tapped Malcolm's old override code into the heavy bolt-on door lock, forced her head up, and prayed that the rupturing sensation collapsing her chest wasn't the heart attack she suspected it was.  
  
The chalky-charcoal darkness, all but total, all but tangible, threw her for only a moment; she had wandered around this room often enough to know her every step without thinking, never bumping into his scant furniture or disturbing a morsel of his meagre belongings. He had always been especially notorious for spending a long time grooming, and she had often got tired of waiting for him to clean up for dinner and fetched it to his quarters. He would emerge from the bathroom, shaved, washed, and dressed, to find her curled up on his bunk with one of his books and a tray of something or other keeping warm under a lid. Sometimes she would pilfer odd items of his clothing and lounge there in them just to see his mouth move up and down in that speechless goldfish way of his, unable to assimilate this unexpected break in his rigid routine. Then he would smile, that hundred-watt grin that unveiled his pointed canines and lit his paper-fine white skin into beaming life; he would laugh, shake his head, and calmly, as serious as if he were presiding at a trial, he would reach up with both hands and vigourously muss his neatly combed and gelled hair into a messy bed-head. When in Rome, he had always said. When in Rome.   
  
She remembered the layout now without a moment's thought. Seven steps forward, three to her left, and the edge of his old bunk was at a level with her knees, his no doubt immaculate pillow smoothed out and the base sheets tucked under with military corners. This always amused her, considering how much destruction the relatively compact and generally mild-mannered man could inflict on a bunk as he slept. It was almost as if his bed-making habits were an effort at making amends.  
  
One step forward, and there was the muffled patter of his breathing in the dark, his soft, measured breathing, like her husband's in every way. Two steps, three; still the pattern did not break. He was a light sleeper, alert every minute of every day, but over their six months together she had learned his impeccable technique for walking without sound, spreading her weight as she trod, taking it slow. As if the deck was not her support or her driving force but merely a line in the sand. A guide for the level she ought to tread. She could creep past now without waking him, and she intended to tonight. Just until she had made up her mind to talk to him. And then, it would be without lights, without the constant reminder before her that this wasn't the face she was so used to gazing at.   
  
Four, five . . . so far, so good. The door had glided silently closed behind her as she ventured in, and there was utter black, the deepest she had seen on board in two years, and unsettling. She hadn't been aware that _Enterprise _was programmed for the Black-Hole-of-Calcutta-look. He must have disconnected the lights somehow, even the gentle moon glow of the night simulators deadened, snuffed out like a candle flame.   
  
Six, seven . . .  
  
A sudden weight slammed into her chest and propelled her back against the bulkhead with a disgruntled clang, a solid arm barred across her throat and the other clutching her wrists as she lashed out. The clang died away in tinny rattles that shot soft vibrations through the metal at her back, and now the only sound was the fast, furious hyperventilation of her attacker, exhaling warmth against her face. She could feel his chest rise and fall deeply against her, his entire solid body blocking her escape, pinning her helplessly to the wall. He was strong, almost inhumanly strong, a Goliath in David's body, an unfair match in a way her Malcolm had never been. She had heard that kind of frantic, fitful breathing from him in only one setting before this; and not through fear or anger, but from a desperately checked, trembling excitement. He had breathed that way when they made love.  
  
This _was _Malcolm Reed. There was no longer the faintest shred of doubt in her mind or in any other fibre of her being, pained and panicked as it was. No copy could do this. And those reflexes . . . they were his to the tiniest detail.   
  
"He sent you, didn't he?" came his husky, smothered voice through the Indian ink air of Malcolm's old quarters. It masqueraded as a question but she knew that when his blood was up Malcolm Reed rarely asked questions. He made demands, imperatives fired in a quick succession, even those with the rising inflection of an enquiry little more than a veiled statement of fact. He teased out information and tested shaky ground . . . but he didn't ask questions. Except for rhetorical ones, the questions that could trap you and make you tell all you knew. Questions, demands - it all came down to one basic precept. He could be quite the bully when it was asked of him.   
  
"Who? Who sent me? The captain?" Her voice shook as she spoke, and she cursed it, not for the first time. She needed her equilibrium, now if never in her life before. This was Malcolm. He wouldn't hurt her. Would he?  
  
The arm at her throat quivered as he recognised who had crept up on him, and who he had thrown against a wall with such brutal force. It braced, yielded, and fell gently away. He eased backward, reluctant to allow her to leave, but acquiescing a little of his control. "H . . . Hoshi," he stammered. Then, tightly: "You shouldn't be here."  
  
Hoshi brought up one shaking hand, slowly, and felt her affronted neck with her fingertips. He was close, she could tell, a murmur in the dark. A shade of faded black in stratas of ebony. Close. So very, very close. Guarding her . . . or in awe of her?  
  
"I know," she said. "But then . . . neither should you."  
  
"I can't help that." Had she thought his voice identical to her Malcolm's? It came from the same vocal chords and had the same impeccable accent, aided by the occasional (possibly deliberate) slip from public schoolboy to barrow-boy that she had grown to love - but when he spoke he did so so very softly, a murmur little more than a whisper of wind, that only her exceptional ears would be certain to catch it all.   
  
She wished, quite suddenly, that she could see him, although only moments before it had been the last thing she wanted. It was stupid, insane, but . . . she couldn't help but feel a little closer to her husband, if only by proxy, being in the presence of this man so very like him. And he was her best and only link to what had happened, on that planet. There was always the chance that he would refuse to share it with her but he had some knowledge of what had happened, of that she was sure. She wanted to judge with her own eyes, and not just her ears, if she could trust him or not. "Who did you expect?" she asked, carefully. "You were afraid . . . weren't you? The Malcolm Reed I know would never jump somebody like that without a good reason." _  
  
_"I'm not the Malcolm Reed you know." There was none of the venom or the chill she would expect from such a statement as that; just that same breathy undertone, without inflection. There was merely a sadness there. Nothing more.  
  
"You were afraid. What were you afraid of?"  
  
"Nothing. Where I come from, Hoshi . . . you learn not to trust anybody too quickly."  
  
"You trusted me."  
  
She heard an exhalation that was brutally shy of a laugh, but even in the blackness, she could feel him smile sardonically at her, indulgently; a teacher amused at a child's antics, blackly enchanted. "That was different."  
  
"How?"  
  
"It just is. Now you'd better leave. Before your captain finds you." His voice settled like velvet over her - or like a shroud. Its softness sent a quiver of disquiet into every bone, and she shivered almost as an afterthought, trapped in the cold brush of something not quite . . . human.   
  
"He won't mind me being here. Not under the circumstances." She gulped, and dared move a little from the wall. She didn't know what she had hoped to achieve by coming here; it all seemed rather childish in hindsight. Had she expected him to respond to her, to tell her what she wanted to know, just because it was what _her_ Malcolm would have done? They looked alike, moved alike, even; breathed alike and had that awful wistful sorrow in their voice; but they could turn out to be as different as night and day. He could even be dangerous. There was no reason, none at all, to expect two versions of a man need share common drives.  
  
She raised her chin even though the gesture was futile in the dark, and backed softly towards where she thought the door was. She could walk quietly, of course, and for that she silently thanked the man that had taught her how. Wherever he was at this moment in time. "You told me my Malcolm wasn't dead," she hazarded. "In the shuttlepod. You said he wasn't dead. How do you know that?"  
  
"I might ask you why do you call him _your _Malcolm." There was a huff, a rueful laughter lost in his sigh. Then: "I saw your wedding ring. My - _his_ - grandmother's ring. This must be very difficult for you."   
  
She gulped. "It is. So . . . you had the same ring?" She could feel her brain computing frantically at this; they shared at least a part of a common history, then. Correction; they shared a common history _in memory. _What did that leave? She hesitated where she stood, one shin pressed against the edge of the bunk, giving her some semblance of her bearings, and strained into the nothing swarming in front of her eyes. Inspiration hit her like a hammer striking a bell; smartly, sharply, leaving echoes imprinted on the air. "Are you from the future, Malcolm?"  
  
"Not quite. But you're warm."  
  
That much she should have known; if he were from her future, he would have known they were married now. He wouldn't have needed to see a ring to deduce that much.   
  
If he were from _her _future. And yet the two Malcolms, in all appearances, may share some degree of their past.  
  
"Malcolm, please," she pleaded, speaking as softly as he did now, mirroring the unnatural calm that seemed to accompany every word that came from his mouth. "I know you've got ideas about what's right and wrong and I know you'd never give information willingly . . . but please just answer me this one thing, and I promise, I'll do everything I can to help you. But please, if you know something . . ."  
  
"I don't. All I can tell you is he's gone to the same place that I came from." He must have sensed her confusion; there was a rustle of fabric as if he had shifted a little, and he continued, in the same, meek voice: "It's basic displacement theory, Hoshi. There can't be two versions of the same entity existing together in any one place, just like two physical bodies can't occupy the exact same point in space-time together. For that to happen one would have to be shifted out of phase."   
  
"I'm not quite sure I understand," she breathed. But her voice failed her, and she could manage nothing else.  
  
_Displaced. _Alive somewhere, and probably unharmed . . . but displaced.   
  
"Where?" she asked suddenly.  
  
"I can't tell you that."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because you wouldn't believe me. And you said if I answered that one question that you would help me. I've answered it. I don't expect you to uphold your end of the bargain."  
  
"Do you have that low an opinion of me?"  
  
"No. But I don't want you in the line of fire. Now go on. Leave. Before he comes back and sees you here."   
  
She pounced on that fragment like a starving dog on a bone. It was the most he had thrown her, and she expected no more. "The captain. Captain Archer has . . . he's been here, hasn't he? He's spoken with you. How much does he know?"  
  
"Nothing that you don't, now. Perhaps less." It was a sparse sound, the barest dent on the air, and resounded all the more deeply for it. She could sense him, close by, not touching her, but in that very private, thin wedge that was her personal space. She couldn't find it intrusive, and hated him for it. She hated him for being so much like her own missing husband.  
  
"And he just took no for an answer?" She could feel the fragile ice she walked on cracking with every word, the danger lurking beyond it suddenly visible through an imaginary fissure. This was what she had come to find out, and the one thing she knew he would never tell her. Not directly, and not without encouragement.  
  
His pained breathing was cut short, and even in the dark, if only through that unearthly silence, she knew that she had shocked him somehow. "Hoshi . . . I can't expect you to understand. But be careful what you say to him. Don't be alone with him, even for a moment. It's not safe."  
  
_(I promise you I'll make it as good as it can be. But it's not safe, Hoshi.)_  
  
"What are you saying? That the captain is dangerous?" She bridled instinctively, defensive in a way she hadn't been since entering this room; suddenly the fact that she had been starting to believe him - had _wanted _to believe him - seemed pitifully foolish. Those words couldn't have come from his lips. She wouldn't allow herself to believe that they had. "Good try. You know I almost believed you. But Captain Archer is a good man, and he'd never pose any kind of threat to any one of us. Not even the Vulcans. I don't even know what I'm doing here!"  
  
And she turned on her heel, and stamped towards the door.  
  
"Wait." He didn't shout; it was barely even a call after her. There was just that word, left fading into the silence like outward ripples in a calm pool, disturbed by a single drop of rain. She turned back. "The two of us were displaced, Hoshi. That means one of us was _sent _where they didn't belong and it automatically switched us. I know where I was when this happened and I also know that nobody was there to have done it to me, or to arrange for it to happen. I was alone. So I have to assume that he was pushed out of his own place first and displaced me from mine." She heard him swallow, the only indication of emotion from him, even now. "It takes a person or a device of some kind to do that. And there were only three people on that planet, weren't there?"  
  
She was trembling like a willow in an autumn breeze, bitterly unable to deny where his gentle coaxing was leading her. He was right. He had to be. There was no other explanation.  
  
She stormed back to the door, her feet pounding her frustration from the metal like a forger's hammer on iron. He didn't call after her again.  



	8. THREE LITTLE WORDS 3

SEVEN  


  
Hoshi pressed her cheek to the cold metal and thanked whatever drifting non-corporeal entities stupid enough to be in the neighbourhood that she didn't have T'Pol's conspicuous appendages. That Vulcan would have had serious problems lying in this airvent on her chest.  
  
She wrestled with a snigger, biting on the side of her hand in desperation until she left a half-moon of tiny indentations in the flesh. There was nothing to laugh at, but hysteria had been wending its way through her insidiously for some hours now like a dark wind breathing a stench of decay, and she didn't know how to keep excorcise it if not by laughing at nothing. _Not now. Pull yourself together, sweetheart. Don't laugh now._  
  
In the room below her the bunk creaked as he lay back, clearly with his boots still on - something her own Malcolm would never have done - and she sucked in her breath as hard as she could. The soft moan of springs abated after a moment, and if she strained herself to an unprecedented level, her ear pressed firmly to the grating until a pattern of criss-cross marks like a burnt waffle was branded into her cheek, she could just distinguish the pale sound of his breathing. She prayed he wouldn't hear hers. His ears had always been good, but hers were better, and she could barely make him out.  
  
There was a catch in his breath like a broken shutter rattling in the wind, a catch she didn't much like, and the suspicion she had flirted with beat its way back to the surface at the sound. He was in pain and doing his best to conceal it, even here where no-one would hear him, something once again unlike her expectations - her husband could be stupidly brave, even reckless, but boy could he whine about it afterwards. Not with everybody, not in the presence of the crew that ultimately looked to him to be the model officer and the epitome of restraint, but with those he trusted, like her, he often gave vent to it in very colourful and unintentionally hilarious ways. And at times, rare, distressing times, in more emotional ones. Not so the man lying motionless down in that room now. There was a faint whimper, quickly stifled, and then a deeper silence. The ultimate stiff upper lip.  
  
His arm had been busted up in the scuffle, but not too severely; the bleeding had stopped on the shuttlepod and there had been no swelling and little bruising. She had been flying the shuttlepod and had allowed the captain and their house guest to take care of the wound, but investigation had shown no broken bones, no torn ligaments. No, something other than that injury was the cause, something fresher and unknown to her . . . something that had happened since they arrived back on board under those bizarre circumstances.   
  
She swallowed back the vinegar-water taste in her mouth, face-to-face with the only conclusion that fit. After all, only one person knew he was here besides her. Only one person could have been in this room with him.  
  
_(Don't be alone with him, even for a moment. It's not safe.)  
  
_She was a nanosecond away from sliding down out of her hiding place and confronting him with it when the door swooped open, flooding watery puddles of light onto the deck below her, and somebody entered the room. Hoshi scurried backwards from the grating hastily and lay stupefied and still in the vent, listening to everything that went on below - but blind to it. Her stomach churned with the possibilities, barbed wire wrapped around her most important organs. Who was she frightened for? The captain? Herself, even though they didn't know she was here?  
  
She couldn't fool herself as she might like on that one.  
  
"Lights," the newcomer commanded softly. They came on without warning and shone into the vent in upward-lit checkers through the grating, making her blink. She knew the man's voice - it was Captain Archer.  
  
"I really must learn how you do that," she heard Malcolm mutter; half-asleep, half-sarcastic, completely defiant. The bunk groaned as he straightened and she thought he must have stood - the springs fell ominously silent after that. She lay still where she was in the vent, wanting to crawl closer and peek, knowing it wasn't safe.  
  
"Not lost the sense of humour, I see. Never mind. I guess I'll learn to live with it, if you don't die of it."  
  
There was a rueful quality to Malcolm's voice as he replied to this, still meek, still almost emotive in his tone. "Is that a threat, or an example of _your _sense of humour?"  
  
"You're not laughing."  
  
"Neither are you."  
  
There was a standoff at this, both silent, and Hoshi resisted the urge to squirm, galled at her inability to see them. Something was wrong about this; it was as if these two knew each other. There was history fused not into the words, but into the spaces between them. Each full stop was a bullet hole and each question mark a hangman's noose.  
  
"I didn't come here to play games, Mr. Reed. The truth is I didn't expect you, and now I don't know what to do with you. I don't suppose there's any question of dressing you up as your double indefinitely; not with those eyes."  
  
"You wouldn't risk it anyway."  
  
"You're right. I wouldn't."  
  
"You don't trust me."  
  
"It's a bit late to be coy, don't you think? Besides; we weren't alone down there."  
  
Hoshi bit her lip - hard - to keep back a sound. What sound, she didn't know.   
  
(_Don't be alone with him. It's not safe.)  
  
_"Hoshi?" There was a slight rise in Malcolm's voice, a hitch almost, but negligible. "Hoshi's a child. She doesn't know what's going on."  
  
She almost tore from her hiding place at that, without a moment's thought, too indignant even to speak. How _dare _he? But the question the captain asked next knocked that thought right out of her mind. Intrigued, confused, and downright terrified, she sank meekly back against the metal, pipes in her back and light in her eyes, and paid attention.  
  
"What happened to the other one? She went missing the same time as you. To be honest, we were convinced you were both dead."  
  
"You were half right," Malcolm responded, carefully. "It's a good job for me that Trip didn't give up on us as easily as you did. He never believed we were dead."  
  
There was a hearty, gut-deep roar of laughter from Archer. Hoshi could only listen, helpless to understand what her ears told her; unable to move, but boiling like a storm-torn sea inside. "Is that how you escaped? Trip? Looks like the engineer that's never in engineering finally did something right."  
  
"And someone else. Someone a little closer to your heart, if not to your way of thinking."  
  
Archer's voice dropped to somewhere below absolute zero. It could freeze lava in a heartbeat and crack hearts in less. Hoshi shivered. "Him," he said.  
  
"Who else? I hate to resort to such an old cliché, but he's twice the man you are."  
  
"Actually . . . he's exactly half. Or one and the same. It's all apples and oranges, Lieutenant."  
  
Malcolm's voice deadened as Archer's had done, descending to an unshakeable whisper. It barely concealed the quivering heat rising from his every syllable like steam. "I don't hold that rank anymore."  
  
"Finally promoted you, did they? Well, it's not as if you didn't work for it."  
  
"Starfleet fell, _Captain. _It's gone, finished. Everything your father worked for - it's over. There's not an NX-class ship left in known space; the _Enterprise _is . . ."  
  
There was a clang that reverberated through the room's flimsy walls and buffeted waves of vibration through the vent where she lay. The arching tubular space snatched up the noise and sent it roaring and echoing around her like the bells of Notre Dame. She tuned her ears downward as the aftershocks abated, knowing that one of two things had happened, and unable to see which. There was no sound from either of them, no way of knowing who had attacked whom, though she could guess. Archer was the next to speak, angrily, and she knew then it was he that had rammed into Malcolm. Was this the first time, she wondered, sickly. "You're lying! They told me . . ."  
  
The most wicked of Malcolm's eclectic laughs spilled into the last echoes of angered metal, and Hoshi shuddered involuntarily, the barbed wire tightening into her heart and liver like a fist. Gooseflesh rose along her cold arms and the chill draft of air rattling through this network of tunnels brushed against her face like silk. He and her darling ambitious lieutenant were so much alike, in some ways, and that deliciously _knowing _chuckle was perhaps the most alike of all. "What?" he said, scornfully. "And you _believed _them? After what they've done? I always thought you were naive, _sir . . . _but I never thought you were stupid."  
  
There was the sound of bone striking bone, and a dull thunk as Malcolm was driven to the deck, and was silent. He made no discernible sound either of pain or surprise, not even under his breath. She could understand that, she thought, as perverse as it was in its way; the satisfaction of any attack came from seeing its victim react. "How would you like to go back to them, Malcolm? It can be arranged, even here. I don't know what they did to you . . . but I can see from your face it wasn't pleasant."  
  
Hoshi crammed her knuckles in her mouth and bit down on them till her teeth were numb. She had almost allowed a shocked, unwilling little cry to slip out, and she mustn't allow that, she mustn't be found. Not by the man she had been calling 'Captain' for these past months. Whatever had taken place on Tut, she had been the sole witness - and both men knew it.   
  
"So what are you going to do with me?" forced a breathless Malcolm, with the scrabbling, dragging sounds that meant he was making himself stand. "You can't exactly let them take me anywhere from here, not from the _Enterprise _itself - that would only make fingers point at _you._"   
  
"No," Archer agreed, tightly. "But I can get you off this ship legitimately and let them take it from there."  
  
"And in the meantime?"  
  
"I'm not too concerned. After all, nobody knows you're here . . . do they? I've disconnected the sensors to this room, and Trip thinks it's a glitch." He chuckled, entirely without mirth. "That should keep him busy for a day or two, at least. It would usually be my armoury officer's job, of course, but he's indisposed due to his little allergy attack down on the planet. All that pollen."  
  
The words tangled in Hoshi's mind like brambles in a hedgerow, and although she tore at them and twisted them all she got for her trouble was a series of runic scratches. _Them. _She ran cold instinctively at the tone both men used, one an undercurrent of unadulterated dread, the other one of distrustful reverence. _Them. _Somebody both men knew.  
  
_(After all, nobody knows you're here)  
  
Except me, _she thought, and swallowed. _Nobody knows he's here but me.  
  
_"How?" Malcolm murmured, barely loud enough for her to hear. "How can the two of you be so different?"  
  
"Apples and oranges, Mr. Reed. Apples and oranges."  
  
There was the clump of heavy boots on metal, the swish of the doors opening and closing, then silence. Below, the lights quietly clicked off.  



	9. THREE LITTLE WORDS 4

Finally! The uploads are working so I can get back to updating both this and Under My Skin'. Sorry for the delay, it wasn't me!  


EIGHT  


  
She lay there, breathing. Was she breathing? There was a whistle in her head that might only have been an echo of her lungs, idling in and out, expelling carbon dioxide, letting in oxygen and nitrogen, but it sounded like a cruel wind through broken glass. Outside of her, slicing through her, not a part of her body but a force against it. Was she breathing? Was _he? _That last blow had sounded like a rock slamming into a paper bag full of wet sand, muffled, its shock absorbed by tissue and bone. He hadn't made a sound. He hadn't then, and he didn't now, not even now when his prison warder had gone and left him with only the cool darkness to hear. Only these blind four walls to see his pain. She strained over the screech in her head and shuffled forward in the ink-black vent until her cheek bruised against the razor-edged grille, still listening, holding her breath. The wind in her ears dimmed and billowed to nothing and of course it must have been her breathing, roaring inside her like a bursting dam. It must have been, because now that she stopped, _it _stopped.  
  
She turned an ear to the grille, and waited. She expected the faint squeal of the bunk as he climbed back on, the scuffle of his feet pacing on the deck in those rough rag-tied boots, anything . . . but there was only utter stillness. The resounding ghost of that last blow cracked against the inside of her skull, and involuntarily she gasped out her last reserves of air.   
  
_(I don't know what they did to you . . . but I can tell from your face that it wasn't pleasant)  
  
_That battery-acid taste had risen in her mouth again, drier this time, stripping the moisture from her tongue and the skin from her teeth. She swallowed it back defiantly. Where was this man from? What could possibly have happened to him to make him so acceptant, so resigned, and somehow so _powerful? _She remembered the harsh heave of his chest as he breathed against her, that high, fast, tuneful quiver that had been so much her husband's in his most emotional, most vulnerable, moments. It was excited, feverish . . . but it had been _frightened _this time, too . . . hadn't it? Like he waited between every breath for someone to hurt him again. That breathing. Those eyes, so quick and bright and fierce as they studied the world around him. The silence. It was adding up to something but they weren't numbers she cared to crunch - one and one made two but maybe, just maybe, she wanted them to be wrong this one time and make three.  
  
"You can come out, Hoshi. He's gone."  
  
She froze, and sucked her breath in hard again. He had heard her. Screw it, he had heard her.  
  
"Hoshi. I know you're hiding somewhere. I can hear you. Come out."  
  
There was no accusation in it, precious little _anything _in it, and Hoshi twisted her hand to the grille and loosened its already loosened edges. She could have wriggled backward down the vent to the junction and turned back to her own quarters and the open vent she had left there, kept herself out of this equation, but in a dull, unthinking way she knew she was already in it - this time, one and one did make three, and there had been three people on that planet, the two that had exchanged veiled threats in here and the one that had watched them do it.   
  
_(He's twice the man you are)  
  
_But she had a feeling, a tight, fluttery feeling like flailing goldfish in a waterless bowl, that neither of the two she had been listening to were who she thought they were.  
  
She swung down from the open vent, feet first, her hands grasping the sharp edge, and hung there a moment, trying to get a sense of him in the black. He was too still, too silent, and she dropped down reluctantly. If she landed on him, it would be his own stupid fault. "He's not Captain Archer," she said. It wasn't a question, any more than his ever were. She wished it could have been. She wished that more than she could say.  
  
There was a warm rush of air to the right of her, neither a laugh nor a sigh but a musical something hovering between. Between one world and the next, in shades of unfathomable grey. "Oh. He is, Hoshi. Sad to say. He's just not . . ."  
  
"Not _my _captain Archer. Just like you're not _my _Malcolm Reed." There was no laugh this time, only silence. He seemed to use it like a second language - and like any language, if she listened hard enough, if she _studied _hard enough, she would eventually begin to understand it. She had come across something similar, once . . . a silent race, without vocal chords and without gesture and yet somehow communicating in ways she couldn't begin to comprehend. Telepathy? She would like to believe it, if only for the distinction of being the first human to encounter an extrasensory language. "There was another me . . .wasn't there?"  
  
"You weren't supposed to hear that."  
  
"Wasn't there?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
She gulped, taking what felt like a mouthful of gravel down her throat. She hadn't expected him to be quite so up front about it. "What happened to . . . her? He said the two of - us - were captured, presumed dead. Who captured us?" She asked it without expecting much of a reply, but maybe that would be just as well - because although she asked who had captured them, what she was really asking was who had killed her.  
  
There was a tearing sound, the scratchy whine of fabric being ripped by two hands. It was coming from her left, and she seized the indication of his whereabouts eagerly. She had automatically turned a little that way before she realised how pointless it was. "_Them," _he said, in a voice that was itself little more than a shade of grey._ "_Or their foot soldiers, to be more precise. I never saw who they worked for."  
  
"Describe them to me."   
  
The ripping stopped, but she heard his sharp intake of air in the pause, and waited, her chest squeezed dry and her lips quivering apart in a shaky little sigh of her own. "I never found out exactly where they were from," he continued, slowly. "It took me months to even get a name. They're not . . . normal, Hoshi. Not like the other aliens we've met in our travels."   
  
She nodded to herself and folded her arms tightly around her, pulling her fingers inside her sleeves. The room was warm, but ice had struck into her bones with sudden, raw resolve. "You can't tell me anymore."   
  
"Oh." He chuckled, wickedly. Weakly. She tried not to hear the pain in it because she couldn't afford for her emotions to take over, to even kick into gear. She couldn't afford to prejudge anything he said or anything he did. Instincts rose and she pounded them down harder than she had ever hit the strong man scale at a fairground. "I can. I just . . . I'm not sure that I should."   
  
"Because it's to do with . . . another me?"  
  
"Precisely."  
  
Checkmate. It was a stupid thing to remember at a time like this, ludicrous even, but she wasn't about to apologise for her own mind's oddities today. The one time they had played chess had been back in the days when they were still Lieutenant and Ensign rather than Malcolm and Hoshi, back in the days when all she knew of him was snatches of conversation over their stations or brief dinners with Travis in the mess hall. They had never finished that game, never found out who would have won . . . but she didn't plan on being out-strategised now. Maybe it was time to find out just how evenly matched they were. "If my Malcolm has somehow gone to . . . wherever you came from, I think I have a right to know as much about that place as I can. Who is this 'they'?" she asked, brokenly.  
  
In the darkness, he sighed, more deeply than before. This time it was full of nothing but regret. "It was about six months ago. I was on a mission planet side with _my_ Ensign Sato, and we were . . . ambushed. They kept us separately, didn't let us speak to each other. They wanted me to do something for them. Something my conscience wouldn't allow me to do. And when I wouldn't do it . . ."  
  
"Go on."  
  
"When I wouldn't do it . . . they threatened me with her life."  
  
"She died." That wasn't a question, either, and even more than the first she wished it might have been._ Maybe in another life_, she thought, bitterly. _In another life_. "Describe them to me."  
  
"When we first saw them . . . they were in ranks, along the hill. There must have been hundreds of them. I don't know, it was too dark to see. We hid in the lake we'd seen earlier that day, underwater. Needless to say I didn't much like that part."  
  
"But she wouldn't let you drown." It came from her mouth like a ghost from the deeps of an ancient house, cold on her breath and colder as it hit the room's warm air. Her body was like ice; it was only logical that anything she had to say would sound as much.  
  
The silent ranks along a hill. Those flashes of black armour in acid neon lightning. Storms, water . . . she knew without another word from him that this man and his Hoshi had seen those selfsame creatures, been taken by the same unrelenting hordes, and subjected to the same dilemma that had thrown them together. If she asked him about chestnuts and I Spy and kissing in the rain he would complete the gaps in her story with a faultless tongue and even more flawless memory, she was sure of it.  
  
But she was a professor at heart, a true collector of knowledge, and this, like everything else, had to be put to one final test. "Describe them to me," she said, firmly. "Please. Just tell me what they looked like."  
  
"Tall. About eight feet or thereabouts. Black armour, elongated limbs. Helmets, you couldn't see their face . . ."  
  
". . . but you didn't want to. I know."  
  
For a moment, nothing. Then: "How could you possibly know that?"  
  
"Because the same thing happened to us. Six months ago. But I get the feeling it ended very differently for you. And . . ."  
  
She couldn't say it. Much as she wanted to be bigger than that, larger than the situation swamping her, she couldn't push through that last dreadful hurdle. Thinking of that other Hoshi's death should have been like thinking of a sister's, a twin sister, granted, but a separate being still, something outside of herself and removed from her . . . but as her exposure to this Malcolm taught her things she would rather not learn, she had come to think of him not as Malcolm Reed's twin brother but as _him, _mark II. Thinking of that other Hoshi was like attending her own funeral, and she shivered, wanting her husband's arms around her. Wanting to lay her head on his shoulder and listen to his breathing. Wanting to lose herself in him and let him take her mind away from her body for a few minutes, if minutes was all they could afford. She closed her eyes, pressed her knuckles into them, bringing to mind the rapid, syrupy heat that flowed through her when he did those very things . . . clinging to a memory of him fused to her, knowing it would have to enough.   
  
"And for her," the silent man in the blackness said in her place.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"I have to ask, Hoshi; how did you . . . I mean, how did it end? How did you get out?"  
  
"When that hour was up . . . they let me talk to him. Just one last time, before they did what they threatened to. I think they thought I could change his mind, make him do what they wanted."  
  
"And he did?" Again, no accusation. No incredulity, no horror or wonder or reaction of any kind. Just that, a statement of fact. Nothing more and nothing less.  
  
_Checkmate. _  
  
"He did, but it's not what you think," she added, hastily. "The EM barrier he'd built around the city worked and the shot was deflected. Well, soaked up, to be more precise."  
  
"And they just let you go?" That was scoffing, unbelieving, and no mistaking it.   
_  
(We're both dead anyway, Ensign. You know that, don't you?)  
  
_"No," she said, defensively. "I escaped. The damsel in distress escaped and I rescued Prince Charming before the gas they were leaking into his cell could finish him off." The flash of anger passed like a cloud shadow on the earth, and she bit her lip, cursing herself for being so thoughtless. How could she have been so thoughtless?   
  
If she could have seen him, she felt sure she would have been given a curt nod, his mouth set into a thin, grim line, his shoulders pulled back in that slightly pompous way of his. She could imagine it, bright enough to leave it scarred onto her retinas like the sun's afterimage. "You know how you're feeling right now, Hoshi? You might be denying it but you feel like the world ended today. Now you have every reason, _every reason, _to expect your Malcolm will come back safe and sound. My Hoshi's gone. I've had to live feeling like that and worse every day for six months, and they weren't a pleasant six months, believe me. Your 'captain' had that right."   
  
It was the most he had said in one burst, and it had been because of her. If she had heard pain in that gasp moments before, then she heard it breaking like surf in that sharp speech. Like surf at the base of a waterfall. She took a hesitant step in the direction of his voice, half-expecting that he would back away from her as he had in the clearing. The silence told her that he hadn't budged. "Malcolm, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But if . . . if it ended differently where you come from . . . how long were you there? Surely _Enterprise _. . ."  
  
"_Enterprise." _He swallowed so hard she could hear it, close beside her now, so close. "While I was away _Enterprise _was attacked. The crew were scattered. Earth was all but ripped to shreds and Starfleet fell. It was three months before Trip and your Captain Archer could get to me."  
  
She had held her arms out to him. She didn't know why. Maybe it was an automatic gesture, a ward against bumping into him in the dark, a sign of truce lost without light . . . but she couldn't help but realise, privately and against every grain in her body, that she was responding to his voice. Her darling ambitious lieutenant had sounded like this only a few rare times, and every time, this had been her first instinct. He had never let her hold him the way he held her, he always had to be in control and be the pillar of strength . . . but it hadn't stopped her from making the gesture, all the same. She did it now without thinking, and quickly dropped her arms to her sides. "You were there for three months?"  
  
"It felt more like three years, if that helps. They figured I would be useful. They had learned a lot from you - from my Hoshi - and they could write notes to me to make their various demands. For technology, mostly, but I couldn't help but think . . . but _assume _that they had another agenda. They didn't like it much when I said no. After what they'd done I wasn't about to give them _anything, _no matter how . . . persuasive . . . they were_."_   
  
She swallowed, railroaded by the insurmountable knowledge that nothing she said would be enough. And maybe saying nothing would be the most she could do . . . but it would take a far braver and colder woman than she was to hear that revelation and show no reaction to it. "What happened for those three months, Malcolm?"  
  
"Why are you asking?"  
  
"Well, I . . . it's just . . ."  
  
"Morbid curiosity? That's all right. It's only human, Hoshi, wanting to know. Wanting to know for the _sake _of knowing. It's that dark little rush, that tiny bite of interest that compels you to look at the accident as you pass by, even when you want to look away. Looking at the very cold, very dead face of somebody you love and knowing it's a mistake, but doing it anyway. You can't help asking the question even if you don't want to hear the answers, and sometimes the answers haunt you for life. So the real question is: do you want to ask?"  
  
He was so motionless, so devoid of artifice; the amusement was there and it was like a slap across her face, it was knowing and unaccusing and she couldn't help but feel hopelessly overpowered by his logic and his silky, secretive tone, like bitter chocolate and cream. It was the whisper of temptation that fluttered in the back of her mind, darkly attractive, sweetly repulsive. Compulsive. He was baiting her, and it had been a long time, a _long_ time, since she had been out-charmed and disarmed by anyone. Hoshi swallowed again, feeling her body turn to water from her chest to her toes in a fainting gush. It felt like the ground falling away from her, that little hitch of gravity as a lift plunged downward into nothing. "Do you want me to ask?" she returned.  
  
"It would be a sign that you cared, wouldn't it? Some indication that you were prepared to accept what I have to say." He appeared to take this moment to consider; she waited, tensed, but determined not to let him trap her that way a second time. "Yes," he said, after a moment. "I want you to."   
  
"Then I'm asking." She listened for his breathing again, so shallow now, as close to silence as she had ever heard from human lungs, and took a careful step towards him. She couldn't be more than two feet from him, but he didn't move away. "What _happened _ to you, Malcolm? What did they want with you?" It was barely a whisper, and as it faded she felt that serene breath she had latched onto like a life buoy in a flat sea gush warmly on her face. There was a murmur of movement, a suggestion of his hand lingering by her hair as if to touch her . . . but it fell away again without contact, without closing the negligible space between them, and she released a gulp of air she hadn't been aware she was holding.  
  
"I said I wanted you to ask. I didn't say that I would tell you." Then, clearly meant for his own ears and not hers: "Not _this _accident."  
  
"But you _want _to tell me. You do, I can hear it in your voice. Don't forget that I _know _you, or at least I know Malcolm Reed. Better than anyone. You can't fool me."  
  
He sighed. "Hoshi . . . I'm flattered you're willing to accept me so easily. That I'm telling you the truth, even if it isn't very much of it. But don't believe everything you see. I'm not the same Malcolm Reed you say you know so well, and the things that made me what I am . . . they didn't make _him."  
  
_"But you _were_. You knew this ring and you went on the same mission . . . I'm willing to bet that you have the same memories as my Malcolm right up until that day in the bunker. I don't know what else to believe but it's the only thing that makes sense. What _are _you? A clone? From some freaky mirror universe? What?"  
  
"I'm not a clone. Test-tube, re-mapped DNA, that sort of thing, you mean? I might have the same body and the same memories to a point, as it appears we do . . . but I don't imagine a clone would have the same scars. Scars that nobody knows about but you. How could anybody copy what he never allows anyone to see?"  
  
"How do you know he doesn't let anyone see them?"  
  
So obvious, and yet she didn't see it coming. "Because _I_ don't. I have the same scars, Hoshi. Maybe even one or two more. I'm trusting you know them as well as I do. I know you won't be able to see them, not in here, but . . . if you need proof, you can feel them. See with your hands the same way you 'feel' with your ears, and I know you do. I won't bite."  
  
She hesitated, but it was fleeting, and not for the reasons she might have imagined, half an hour ago, that it would be. If he wanted to grab her and use her as a convenient human shield then there had been enough opportunities; he had trapped her against that wall without effort, he was close now, and seemed to understand her whereabouts in the dark far better than she understood his. No, she wasn't afraid of him, not in that way; but being so close to him . . . being so close to that wonderful rough-and-tumble smell and hearing not just that satiny voice treading the air as softly as his feet trod the deck, but the vibration in his throat, the purr that idled underneath, and to feel the unnatural heat thrown from him . . . to sense all that and know this wasn't her husband, to have her mind telling her something so very opposite to all her senses combined . . . she didn't think she could survive that. Not now. If her Malcolm was here, maybe it would be different. This . . . it felt like being unfaithful.  
  
"You're carrying out a scientific study, Hoshi. It's up to you. Believe me without evidence if you like, if that makes you more comfortable . . . or don't. Or find out for yourself. I'm not going to force you."  
  
Hoshi gave a watery sigh and pressed both palms against her hair, loose now, off-duty style and undisciplined. That was what this was; undisciplined. But if she could prove he was telling the truth about this then the chances of his other stories being the truth increased exponentially. About the captain, about her husband, everything. "Okay," she gasped; then again, more firmly. "Okay. Guide me."  
  
There was a rustle, and she heard the slightest scuff of feet on the deck. Light, so light. He was edging closer, and stopped when he bumped into her. Fingers met her arm and trailed slowly to her wrist, locking around it, guiding it to him. Feeling their way when seeing was out of the question. Seeing with her hands and feeling with her ears. The skip in his breath and the rasp of it in his throat had a texture she had never felt with her hands. Like velvet. She gulped, letting her arm move with his, until it slipped under the hem of his loose-fitting shirt. The 'captain' must have given him his own clothes back, a small mercy, but a mercy nonetheless. Her palm met his back, hot, smooth, and he let go of her wrist, trusting her to do the rest by herself. He was barely breathing anymore and she could only hear her own, fast and furious in her head.   
  
Ridges. Tiny ridges, threading his back. That fine line from his right shoulder to his waist, the thicker band cutting across it . . . others besides . . . the evidence of shrapnel from a crashed vehicle, all as it should be.   
  
Hoshi fell back as if he had burnt her.  
  
"All right," she wavered. "All right. I . . . I have to go. I have to . . . just go."  
  
"Okay."  
  
He reached out and with his hands flat on her shoulders, very gently turned her towards the vent. At least . . . she assumed that was what he did. "I'll give you a boost up," he said.  
  
She shuddered, glad he had already taken his hands away and hadn't felt it. Nobody should be so acceptant. It wasn't natural. It wasn't human. "In a minute. There's something I have to know."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Why did you call me a child?"  
  
There was a pause. _Ask a stupid question, Hoshi.  
  
_"To protect you."  
  
"That's what I thought."  
  
She raised her foot and he found it with both hands and slid them under her boot sole, braced to heave her upwards. He counted to three, and boosted her. She reached upwards with both outstretched arms and caught the vent's edge effortlessly to haul herself up . . . but he called her back as he had before, waiting until she was safely inside, speaking before she had time to vanish. "Hoshi?"  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"You will come back, won't you?"  
  
She almost turned back . . . but what would be the point? She couldn't see him. And anyway . . . she didn't think she would _want_ to see the faint hope on his face that she heard in his question. A real question, and not a veiled imperative or rhetorical tactic. An honest question needing an honest answer.  
  
"Of course," she murmured. And left without looking back.


	10. INVICTI 1

**WARNING:** This chapter contains alternate character death and implied torture. Nothing nasty. Also contains extensive spoilers for Incentive', my previous fic.  


  
PART THREE: INVICTI  
NINE  
  


Malcolm Reed laced his hands together behind his head, his tangled hair catching in his long fingers, blank eyes staring helplessly up into the dark, and did nothing. Perhaps once upon a time he would have been waiting - a word that despite its clinical definition suggested action, the very essence of a verb, _to do _- but not anymore. Waiting implied an awareness of time that simply wasn't there. He had learned not to wait in ways that would shock his old friends to an early grave, so now he didn't wait, didn't hope for tomorrow or dwell on today. He did nothing, his mind cast adrift, smelling the crisp, recycled aroma of the ship's air, hearing its low rumble of engines and life support systems, feeling the gentle background purr of a million different operations thrumming through the bank and through him. He had missed this; for months now everything had been too quiet, too pale, unreal. The most recent weeks had been a chaos of noise, destruction, running, fighting . . . but for the most part, even those had been rain spots thumping brutal, bruised craters in dry earth. Moments of activity in an unending drudgery, long days of hiding, sneaking, sleeping, planning. Death. Always, there was death. Three weeks ago, his party had been three; now it was two, another man down, another of _Enterprise's _finest buried in an unmarked grave where _they _would never find him. Death stalked, and it had taken some perverse liking to Malcolm Reed, like a shadow pinned to his own cautious foot. It had begun with her; and it had never ended.  
  
_(How would you like to go back to them, Mr. Reed? It can be arranged)  
  
_He blinked and he stared into nothing, wishing he could feel the fear that threat was intended to provoke. Wishing he could shudder, some small, human indication of life. He almost tapped the fingers of his right hand against his skull; almost. It seemed like too much unneeded effort, strength wasted. _Time _wasted.  
  
He smirked, unable to taste any real mirth in it. What was time, anyway, but a way to keep account of the injuries? A way to mark the losses, those hours nothing more than all the gravestones he had never been able to leave. It healed the memory, he had been told; it faded the deepest wounds. But to him, one hour had destroyed his interest in time forever. And it had been forever.  
  
-------------------------  
_  
It was a routine mission with no reason to fail, and that, perhaps, has made it a danger . . . defences grow lax when the crew grows complacent. When_ he_ grows complacent. He can no longer remember the incident that sparked the notion; there is only this thin flutter of disquiet in the hollow between his stomach and his heart, and the vague impression of water and of shadows on a hillside . . .  
  
He stretches out slowly on the narrow bench, flinching as the raw wounds in his back rub scathingly against the metal, and presses his face into the crook of his elbow. At least he can think with the harsh overhead lights fenced back this way, his eyes masked by the cool cotton fabric of his uniform, and his unkempt hair forced back from his temples by the cuff of his sleeve. He can think, if only in droning circles like a trapped bluebottle, piecing together the remnants of the incident still in his memory; but the picture remains obstinately incomplete.  
  
He squeezes his eyes shut and presses his arm harder into them; his saturated uniform stinks of smoke and sweat. He has woken to find her gone and her last call for help hanging statically on the dense air, long after the mouth that uttered it is no longer in sight. Then blackness until he woke here.  
  
Wherever here is.  
  
She is gone, and he is here, for better or for worse. He prays, in a corner of himself where words are meaningless, that she has escaped - but he knows, in his heart, that she has done no such thing. Hoshi rarely screams these days unless it is a cry for help - still too naive, too innocent, to realise that it is the worst thing she can do. The help hadn't come because he had been powerless to give it, and the knowledge grates like a splinter under the skin; he has a duty to perform, a promise made to the captain that Hoshi will be safe in his hands, and in that duty he has failed. The penetrating silence only makes the accusation echo like a tired drumbeat in his head.  
  
He has woken to this near physical silence, lying tangled on the cold metal floor and staring up into equally cold and colourless lights that hang too low over him and blot out his peripheral vision. He opened his eyes to this hideous glare with the expectation that he will find Hoshi here with him, and stirs with a mild rebuke already on his tongue, only to find himself alone.  
  
Without someone to protect, he doesn't known quite what to do. So he waits.  
  
-----------------------------  
  
Everyone he has ever trained with or served with has assumed Malcolm Reed will be the kind of man to resist forcible incentives. They surmise that his silence will not bend. They see an impenetrable, dutiful officer, one that will remember his place and his obligations in trying times. They even consider him fearless.  
  
The swish of something gliding away and the surreptitious snatch of motion in the corner of his eye startles him, but only for a split-second which he knows he will leave out of his official report, should he live to make one. A section of the wall to his left opens onto an alcove, revealing a console whose tiny lights and beckoning blink seem almost to grin, accusingly, at him. Maybe it is merely the position of those lights which give the illusion of a mouth, toothless and lopsided, smirking broadly at him - or maybe it is his headache returning. Whatever the reason, it takes only one glance for him to take an instant disliking to it. To its idiotic, grinning face, and its silent, patient hum.   
  
He eyes the bright console, watching its screen light up and darken down, a definite pattern formed by the repetition. Trembling and unaware he even does so, Malcolm Reed approaches the console, drawn by its siren's song, and stands, hands slack at his sides, taking in the readings on the small screen.   
  
He knows this.  
  
A nameless alien creation returns his stare, yet in all but the intricate pictorial language it is a system he feels he knows, a hierarchy of protocols and procedures second nature to him. He can solve the launch techniques in a matter of minutes, guided by an indefinite instinct, and barely break into a sweat. If he chooses.  
  
Slowly, Malcolm reaches across and presses the largest of the switches. The small screen sputters and dies with one final flare.  
  
He will resist. As long as he has to._  
  
------------------------  
  
Darkness was like the layers of an onion, he had decided a long time ago. He supposed some might argue that the shading scale from a secondary school art class was a more appropriate, certainly more literal, analogy, but to him, that wasn't right. A shading scale was nothing but orderliness, chronology, a progression clearly seen from the first white square to the last, solid black one. Grey in between, slabs that darkened with each step, the purest to the densest. The steps from light to shadow. So gradual you hardly noticed them deepening, not at first. So subtle that the blackness closed before you knew the white had existed. It wasn't right. Darkness, in whatever shade or texture, wasn't a straight line, anymore than time was; darkness was like the layers of an onion. It circled you in rings, some distant, light, more charcoal than ebony; but those rings tightened, the longer you spent inside them. They squeezed and shrank like a lassoo, drawing in to you in its centre, until it crushes all the breath from your lungs and is blacker than a devil's heart.   
  
But those rings could pull away again. Instead of counting from the outside in, a contraction ending in something too horrible to openly discuss, you could count from the inside out. Blackness could fade back to that hazy twilit moon glow of a warm summer night on earth, star-shod, brilliant.  
  
If you had the gift.  
  
Malcolm at last removed his laced hands and folded them across his chest, loosely. One still stung from the fight earlier today; the other was a little heavy, numbed and prickling from staying in one position too long, but unhurt. No, it was his stomach that did the hurting, his chest, and he folded his arms across his torso not to protect them but to soften the pain. It felt like he was holding it in.   
  
He was hungry - starving, in fact, and it was no idle joke to say so - but that was hardly a newsflash. He'd gone a lot longer than _this _without eating; without bothering to, without remembering to, without being given the choice. Didn't matter. What mattered was that his stomach hurt, and his chest, and his head, and even that wasn't the real reason. No, what mattered was _why. _  
  
He blinked, sorting the layers of darkness above him. It wasn't uniform, as he supposed most people might think; between this bunk and the ceiling he had once stared at night after night, waiting for sleep, there were sediments, and he saw through them clearly. This Jonathan Archer had disabled the lights, to stop him from escaping. The truth was that he hadn't escaped because he didn't want to. There were too many questions about this place he had heard about but only today seen; too many details that he'd never been told. Never found out. Whichever. There were too many faces risen from whatever grave they'd found, and he couldn't leave. Not just yet.  
  
----------------------  
  
_Not for the first time, Malcolm finds himself wishing he had made it a practice to wear a watch. His grandfather had quite the phobia about it - asserting that you can't keep time if you don't know the time—and had been scrupulous in never leaving his house without the comforting band of flexible gold plate fastened securely to his wrist. That old watch had been an antique, a Rolex with its now rare interior workings untouched and unreplaced since its original sale, and once his grandfather had permitted Malcolm to try it on, a privilege extended to very few. Grandad Reed's timepiece was not a matter to be taken lightly, or an honour to be refused. It had slithered up and down the length of his thin forearm ridiculously, the wrist of the ten-year-old he had been swamped even in its tightest setting, but with the fond indulgence that is only possible when years lie between the event and the memory, Malcolm can recall how he had worn it all that day, proudly sporting the token of Grandad Reed's unspoken affection. How his grandfather had smiled almost knowingly at a young boy's boundless enthusiasm for all things grown up.  
  
His father had owned a watch, too. But Malcolm had never been allowed to try that one on.  
  
A blaze of memory jabs at him, as if a shock has stunned life into a dead battery - a line of black silhouettes against the alien moonrise, figures in silent regiments like standing stones against the leaden sky, watching he and Hoshi with a clear intent black as their armour. No. No small race, this; though the errant stab of recall ends there, with he and Hoshi stranded in a dark meadow without cover and surrounded by those grim living barriers all around, it is all he need see, for now. All he feels he can assimilate, with so much still unknown. It is enough to remember that those creatures on the hill had been human-sized, perhaps even a little more.  
  
Malcolm curls two fingers around the collar of his uniform, testing the skin at the base of his skull with his fingertips, dabbing at the greasy sheen clinging to the hairline. He tries not to let the presence of his own bloody sweat frighten him.  
  
But it is difficult.   
  
_If Hoshi's being held in similar conditions_, he reflects blackly, _then she'll be climbing the walls by now._ He almost dares hope she is enjoying better treatment as their sole communications medium, in all likelihood serving as translator . . . but that thought is one he deadens, swiftly. Thinking about Hoshi isn't going to make this situation any easier. Quite possibly her involvement in this ended with that robotic message, and this battle is now solely his, and not hers.   
  
But he will ask, just to be sure.  
  
Just to know that she's all right.  
  
"It's your duty, Lieutenant," he murmurs, berating himself for the hesitation as it comes. "Only your duty."  
  
He holds out for what might be minutes, had he possessed any way to mark the time besides his own biological clock remotely informing him that he is starving, but eventually the garish console wins. He is still adamant that this first look will go no further . . . but he gives in, after a struggle, and takes that first look he swore so vehemently against. The console, he soon discovers, is unbelievably simple to decipher. Even without a means to translate the purely iconic labels and controls it poses no problem to him, the on-screen diagrams unmistakably pointing the way. He can't help but smile, albeit grimly, at that; some things, it seems, truly are universal. He follows where the blueprints lead, hand resting pensively on the controls, his sweat pooling under his fingertips onto the black keys below.  
  
It is a sensor scan. A labyrinthine tracery of fine, electric lines represents a vast complex of some kind, apparently their intended target; and between these lines, some moving, some stationary, are thousands of tiny red dots like swarms of locusts on a field of wheat.   
  
Red dots. _Moving_ red dots.  
  
Lifesigns. Although the language surrounding this diagram tells him nothing, he doesn't need to see a number. There are thousands, and this phase cannon is trained directly on them.   
  
----------------------  
  
He is debating lying down for a while, if only to spare his legs from any worse cramp than he already has, when there is a crackle, and the voice comes. It fills the tiny space with dead echoes.  
  
"Why have you not launched the weapon?" it says, tonelessly.   
  
Malcolm closes his eyes, and swallows. His throat is swollen with thirst. "Because that's not what I do," he says, quietly. "You want me to shoot that thing at thousands of people. I don't know what impression you have of me, but I'm not a killer."  
  
"We have knowledge of your vessel. We know you are the tactical officer. Destruction is your job. Make the weapon work."  
  
The accusation bites; not because it is true, but because of what it makes him out to be. "In a fair battle, I would," he growls, between his teeth. "I do what has to be done to disable an enemy ship. But I don't destroy them. Give me credit that I have some ethics. Even if you don't." He waits, doubting that this message is anything more than a recording; and doubting, in tandem, that anybody could hear him.   
  
There is only ambiguous silence.   
  
"Where's Hoshi?" he demands, after a moment.   
  
"We are willing to hold you here until you comply," the voice repeats, regardless of his question. "The target has been selected for you. We know you can operate this weapon."  
  
Malcolm growls low in his throat, and smashes his fist into the wall. He no longer doubts that at least one of these beings hears him, and to a degree understands him - with or without Hoshi's help, he doesn't know. But the answers he receives all make use of those same few sentences, clearly all they have prepared and recorded, each time selecting the phrase which matches his inquiry or the answer they wish to give. He doubts he will get more from them until they have gone away and spliced together a larger vocabulary.  
  
Good. The more reason he gives them to keep Hoshi alive, if she really is here, the better.  
  
A moment later every one of those assumptions is crushed. "The woman will be terminated unless you comply," the voice replies, pleasantly. "Make the weapon work. You have one hour."  
  
This time the monitor he hates with such black passion jolts to life on its own. Gone are the blueprints, the dots, the aerial survey map; in their place, only a row of cold green zeros glows, apparitions in a dream he can't wake from. Not this time. As he watches, fascinated and morbidly hypnotised, those numbers click from 0:00:00 to 0:00:01.  
  
One hour. The voice has gone, and with it, all chance of negotiating, of offering something other than this favour in return for Hoshi's life.  
  
Malcolm slumps down where he kneels, presses his hand to his eyes to force away the dreadful pound already beginning there, and for a long time, he neither thinks nor feels anything at all.  
  
------------------------  
_  
He hadn't woken from that dream for three months, and the apparitions had been there throughout his whole stay, always taunting him, silently thanking him. They thanked him for not firing on their city, and in his disturbed dreams he almost felt at ease . . . but when he woke, the universe felt thankless once more. The hour had ended, and so had her life. They had told him, and he hadn't believed them. Then they had shown him her body, on the monitor, cold and dead and with her hazel-cream skin blue and veined with emptiness. Her dark hair, falling like a matted black veil over her shoulders and wrapping itself around her slender throat. Still, he hadn't believed them. And still, he had seen none of his captors. For two days and a night they had left him to torture himself, and he had done so, with extraordinary talent. Half of him had listened for those boots on metal because the only alternative was starvation, and a death that would give him more time to dwell on his mistakes than he could bear - but the other half had almost willed himself not to hear them, knowing that nothing they brought would be good.  
  
Then, on the second evening, they had come for him. He had followed those silent monoliths of thorny black metal without a word.  
  
-------------------------------  
  
_He stares down at the dull glint of tarnished metal just peeking out into the light along the slab's rim, because it is easier than seeing what they brought him here to see. If he focuses, he can almost pretend that bench is empty . . . but no. Perhaps not; even if avoiding it directly can soften the blow, it can do nothing to make him believe that blow is all in his mind. Even staring at the edge like this he is reminded of a glimpse of dead flesh at the corner of his eye, to his left - a hand, limp and lifeless as it slips from the slab and reaches its lax fingertips toward the slick, featureless floor.   
  
He swallows, wrenching down a low moan choked with saliva. One of them watches him from the doorway, eight feet of armoured metal plating filling the one and only way of escape. Gauntleted hands clutch a weapon he knows they won't use. Not on him. Their killing is done, for one day. A passionless visor without eyes that he can see continues to spectate, silent, unmoving, a serrated vacuum of what glaring light and precious little warmth there is in the morgue they have brought him to.   
  
He absently swipes at the itching, desperate heat in his eyes with one hand, forcing it still, refusing to let his guard see him tremble. He knows that asking for a moment alone with her will be useless - unheard, perhaps, but certainly ignored or misunderstood. He hates that figure for watching the only small gesture of burial he can give her, for desecrating the moment with its skeletal presence, but it is a choice between suffering it to be marred or giving her nothing at all. She will have no headstone, no funeral, only a paltry Starfleet ceremony conducted by her closest circle of friends - Missing In Action, Ensign Hoshi Sato. It is with a shiver not in his muscles but in his bones that he realises her name will not be the only one remembered. Missing In Action, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed. Presumed dead.   
  
Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, presumed dead but in some unplugged way very much alive, turns slowly back to the motionless, colourless, unharmed body of Ensign Hoshi Sato and tightens his jaw against the flood he knows is coming. It has been years since he cried. _Really _cried. Flickering eyelashes in moments of weakness didn't count. Keeping it back, holding it in, none of it counted. He reaches across to smooth her tangled hair from her marble throat, to cut the noose that appears to strangle the life from her even though she is dead, but his hand stops, halfway. Can he touch her, so cold, so . . . unreal? It isn't death that scares him, and he has touched enough corpses in his time to do it without thought . . . but this is Hoshi. He remembers her warm and breathing, huddled to him under a copse of trees in torrential rain. He can't touch her like this.  
  
But he does. Gently he lets his long fingers strum the hair aside, freeing her face, and it is only now that he realises he hopes to find her eyes closed. Closed, as if she were sleeping. Not open and accusing him of failing in his duty to protect her.   
  
He strokes through her hair in long, sweeping glides for a moment, letting himself see, letting himself accept. Then he stoops, and presses his lips tenderly to her bone-white forehead. He wants to say goodbye. But he can't. He can't accept that he will never see her looking at him with eyes that could swallow universes whole ever again.   
  
"Go ahead," he murmurs, and turning, stares with unbreakable intent at the visored helmet, at the solid metal wall where eyes should be. "I know you hear me. I know you can understand me if you choose to. Go ahead and kill me now because I'm about as much use to you as a corpse at this point in time anyway. Come on! I won't fight. Easiest kill you ever had. He hangs his head at last, and his voice drops to a husk of its former self, a shadow, a glimmer of pain beneath the bravado. Except for Hoshi, he whispers. She was no threat to you.  
  
He feels the betrayal on his face, too late. The armoured guard tilts its solid head to one side, its grip on the gun unmoving. It is watching the single tear blazing down Malcolm's face as if it has never seen such a thing before. As if it doesn't understand. Which, Malcolm is certain, it doesn't.   
  
The guard continues to look at him for quite some time. It doesn't kill him. It doesn't usher him away with the butt of that wicked rifle. It watches, studying the motionless human the way a scientist might study his favorite lab rat. Waiting for him to produce water from his eyes again. But that single tear dries alone and isn't repeated . . . not until what seems like hours later, when his guard tires of waiting, and takes him back to his cell.   
  
As the door glides closed, invisible, not even a hairline crack in the wall, Malcolm Reed, Missing In Action, Presumed Dead, compacts himself into the tightest corner he can find - under that low bunk, hidden from the sordid white lights overhead, bathed in swooning shadow. He lets minutes pass, before he is certain he is alone. Then he buries his face in the cool cotton fabric of his right arm, and tries to pretend the hot moisture soaking his sleeve is nothing more than sweat.  
  
----------------------------  
  
They don't come for him for a day after that, and although he is brought water and some barely edible synthesised biscuits, he touches neither. But on his third day in his cell, they come for him again.   
  
And then the fun begins._


	11. INVICTI 2

Okay. At this point I'm going to 'step out of the story', as it were, and let you in on a few secrets that will hopefully help everyone know where I'm coming from. Unlike the previous chapters, this one finally shows what's been happening to our Malcolm 'on the other side'. That's not a reference to death, by the way. I just felt like being obtuse! No, seriously; this one was a headache and I won't pretend otherwise. I thought it would be only fair to show this, but for reasons of the plot and keeping some cards up my sleeve you might find yourself screaming at me by the end of it for leaving you where I leave you. Sorry. That's why I set Wednesdays to update rather than whenever it was ready. I've always found it's far more bearable knowing there's a part coming, somehow!  
  
Rest assured all will be answered. Eventually. For now, here's what happened to Malcolm.   
  
TEN  
  
Lieutenant Malcolm Reed lay very still, against every clamour of his goosefleshed body telling him it was a moment he couldn't afford. This stone-weighted instant felt like waking from a faint, this moment of gathering awareness, the sensations of things outside of him coming to his attention for the first time; there was a hum in his muscles and an itch in his heavy bones, a swarm of wasps trying to sting their way out. He ignored it. He ignored it and concentrated on lying still, aware of sounds in the distance, but unable to place them.   
  
Not waking up, he realised as feeling crept back into the pervading numbness and the prickling bites of those tiny, persistent internal wasps. Not waking up, but he could understand how the mistake had been made, even encouraged. This was a change of his state of existence, at the very least. The trouble being that he didn't remember a single thing. Nada. Nothing. Zip.   
  
He must have been beamed up without warning, snatched from there to here, but something about that immediate assumption didn't sit as comfortably as it should. Not just the temperature, the blissful coolness on his exposed face and hands, although there was that . . . why would the _Enterprise _crew have transported them aboard, without advanced comm contact? There had been no apparent danger on Tut, despite the mysterious, dense menagerie of biosigns that had registered on their scanners and failed to materialise in practice. If they were back on _Enterprise, _then that left a shuttlepod stranded planet side . . . it didn't make sense. But the acidic, mouthwash tingle in his skin, like a gulp of frosty air after a eucalyptus tablet, could only have been caused by a molecular disturbance of some kind. That tingle was singing soprano through every inch of tissue in his body, and it was rising to a strained falsetto as he thought it.   
  
Of course, the storm. T'Pol and the rest of the bridge crew must have been concerned about the coming of the storm over their landing site and transported them back until it had passed. That, at least, made sense. It was _logical. _  
  
He rolled onto his back and clamped his hand to his temples, careful not to open his eyes. Not just yet. He could see muddy light through the lids, silty and dull brown instead of the limpid, vein-tinted orange of the transporter pad's lights through the skin. He had no desire to meet it head-on until this headache had crawled back into whatever recess of his mind it had come from, and taken the temporary amnesia with it. Funny, the transporter had never had such unpleasant side-effects before; he wondered, a little shy of the nonchalance he was aiming for, if everything had been put back the way nature intended this time. Because he had the mother of all headaches, and everywhere was silent. Absolutely, unfathomably, silent. Except for those not-quite-rhythmic, rumbling _booms _like all three phase cannons fired in deep-throated unison. Had he gone deaf, too? If this was the transporter pad, then where was the operator? Where was Commander Tucker with his unconscionably gung-ho attitude and his unsettling habit of informing Malcolm what a close shave he'd just had? Either they were in the middle of a battle, and those _booms _were precisely what they sounded like, or else . . .  
  
A sudden drop of water struck his upturned face and trickled slowly, inch by sickly-cold inch, down the shelf of his jaw, carving a cool, wet trail like a kiss. It was so cold it burned. He brought a hand up, unsteadily, and pawed it away with the back of his knuckles. The trail over his chin continued to sting, and now his knuckles stung, too.  
  
The booms came again, like broken glass crushed underfoot. Sharper, now, sharp enough to cleave through his headache in one surgical stroke. Not phase cannons, but thunder. Around him, in stark, individual drops that heralded an onslaught, rain began to patter; slowly, one by agonising one, a couple smacking noisily into his uniform. Some rang musically above him as if they fell on metal, others giving the dull, wet thunk of pebbles against a window. Rain. Fat, pregnant, heavy rain.  
  
There was nothing for it now but to open his eyes and get on with it, whatever 'it' may turn out to involve. So he was still on Tut, he assumed, caught in that oncoming storm, stretched out under that turquoise sky with its deeply venomous marine-blue clouds.  
  
Wrong. He opened his eyes to an expanse of sky boiling with black cloud, black as any storm sky on Earth, directly above him; but it was ringed with ragged metal like the hole from a serrated pastry cutter, a circle of sky in a corrugated ceiling. Inside and outside at the same time. Nothing was familiar except for the untethered certainty that he had been somewhere like this before. Like, and unlike. Light and shadow, stained with poisonous blue and trembling with insipid shapes and writhing hieroglyphs, swam across him where he lay; they skated over the floor like searchlights. Everywhere was a contradiction, and brought a sensation of discomforting quiet.  
  
Another raindrop shattered apart on the back of his hand, and this time he let out a startled cry and yanked it back against his chest. Smoke spiralled in lazy, unreal threads of white from the bright spot of pain in the largest index knuckle.   
  
It burned. This particular little shower wasn't water.   
  
It was acid.  
  
Malcolm ducked another and rolled clear of the black-edged skylight, into the safety of the roofed shadows. He was in a small, rusted iron cabin, glassless windows looking out of two facing walls of the four, the corners thick with shadow and dust. He backed into the nearest, still nursing his singed hand, and thought, frantically. He pushed away every question as to what had happened away; what mattered was the situation he found himself in now.   
  
Acid. Weak acid, not enough to remove his skin off with one drop, but corrosive none the less, and scalding as steam. Already, in the centre of the room below the gaping blast-hole in the roof, the metal floor was beginning to smoke. Soon, it would begin to melt.  
  
It would _all _melt.   
  
He trained hawk eyes on the smouldering floor, squinting a little against the gloom, and did a quick calculation. Holes were beginning to appear in the plating, irregular and sheared, and the size of dimes. Soon they would be the size of saucers; say, in thirty seconds. Within a minute they would be the size of dinner plates, and they would start to merge. Then all those little holes would become one _big_ hole.  
  
And then, if the clouds hadn't exhausted themselves and he was still here, then he was in trouble. Quite gargantuan, never-in-his-wildest-nightmares trouble. If he was still here.   
  
The ceiling was bulging downwards as he looked quickly over the empty room, the scoop it made concave above and convex below, the deepening bowl-shape probably filling with acid rain like a bathtub. And when that sagging, warm-taffy bowl-shape at last gave, it would release not just drops, but a _flood _of acid. A deluge. He'd be skinned alive.   
  
If he was still here.  
  
Through the glassless window to his left, Malcolm could make out the downward slope of a steep, scrubby hill, devoid of trees or buildings; just a stretch of weak brown grass, discoloured and worn. The cloud seemed to end at its foot as if a line had been drawn in the sky, and where it ended, likely the rain ended, as well. If he ran, exposed and without protection, he would arrive at the finish line as nothing more than a pile of bleached bones. Nobody, not even the greatest of all the Olympic gold medallists in history, could run at the kind of speed that would be needed to make that distance in less than a minute, and a minute would be about thirty seconds too long. He figured he could withstand that chemical barrage for twenty seconds, maybe thirty. It would hurt like the worst case of sunburn in living history, worse even than the agonising sunburn he'd suffered under that dose of gamma rays and UV a year ago now, but he would be intact, and alive. He would be clear.   
  
Thin stalactites of glooping iron trailed down from the warped and buckled ceiling like creeper. Thick, molten globules struck the floor in smoking, hissing pools. He had ten seconds, maybe less, before he was quite literally toast. Or, to be more precise, fried bread. He wasn't ashamed to admit it; he was scared. This certainly hadn't been covered in Starfleet training. Maybe if he got out of this alive he'd devise a new exercise for interns; the How-To-Survive-A-Molten-Metal-Acid-Storm conundrum.  
  
There was a cabinet at his back, its door hanging askew on aged hinges that groaned as he tapped them. It was flat, perhaps a metre square, and solid, its edges eaten away and corroded a crumbling red. Malcolm took hold of the edge and tugged, a plan slowly solidifying in his mind. The door gave way under his hands easily, the rusted hinges snapping clean in two. He was left holding a sheet of iron like a shield, which he dropped on the floor. He tested it with his foot gingerly, dragging it back and forth. It slid without catching, its smooth surface slippery enough to skate over uneven ground.  
  
He hoped.  
  
Five seconds. He set to work and tore the rest of the cabinet free with his bare hands, gouging great rusty scratches in the palms, but not caring. His knuckle and jaw were competing for most painful area, both throbbing their discomfort into his blood. And his blood was up. _Very_ up.   
  
Three seconds. Two . . .  
  
Malcolm dashed for the room's only door, the cabinet held tight over his head and chest, and kicked it open. It thumped back dully against the outer wall with a hollow clang. Outside, the hillside flared with torn scars of neon lightning in the deluge of acid rain, and the ground smoked and fizzed, spitting live sparks like firecrackers into the saturated air.   
  
One. Behind him, the ceiling caved in with a final, conciliatory squeal. Acid plummeted down into the little disintegrating room behind him like the Red Sea after the exodus. He didn't plan on becoming a drowned Egyptian.   
  
He scuffed the flat cabinet door out onto the hill with his foot, yanked the scrap metal housing down hard over his head, and drop-started the makeshift sled. It shot off into the downpour, with him knelt firmly on top under the protective metal box, at a speed that would put those Olympic gold medallists to shame. One second, two seconds, three . . . the cabinet was beginning to melt and his boots, the most exposed part of him, were fusing into misshapen blobs of rubber around his feet, but he was a third of the way there, racing downward towards the clear sky beyond, almost there, just another few seconds . . .  
  
There was a clap of thunder like a train hurtling full-speed into a brick wall, and a blinding flare of white-hot light speared down only metres from him. The sled veered alarmingly to the right and for a moment he thought the whole smoking rig was going to topple over, but it steadied and plunged on down. Lightning. If he wasn't so paranoid, he would perhaps have taken it for bad luck . . . but he _was _paranoid, and he knew that luck had nothing to do with it.  
  
The weather was trying to kill him. And it wouldn't be the first time.  
  
The cabinet was growing uncomfortably hot against his skin, red-hot, an oven shelf getting ready to roast a turkey, and pinprick shafts of electric-soaked stormlight had begun to pierce through as holes opened, sizzled, and grew. His uniform around his ankles and the jutting outside of his elbows was soaked and within moments would be in tatters, the acid slowly eating away the vulnerable fibres, the skin underneath beginning to prickle as his knuckle and jaw did. First the cotton, but next it would be his skin. Drops had begun to patter through the holes in the box, making tiny, singing spots of pain where they fell. Frying by inches. But he was almost there.  
  
The second bolt of lightning hit its target. He didn't expect any different. Not now that he knew the cause.   
  
The box, top-heavy and warping into a molten modern art sculpture, jolted to one side and wrenched Malcolm with it. He was pulled clean off the sled and tumbled onto the ground, uncovered, exposed, and instantly drenched.  
  
He leapt up with a cry, bracing himself ready for the barrage . . . but it didn't come. Slowly his arms unclasped from their protective knot around his head, and fell, leaden, to his sides.   
  
Around him, the air was dry. The clouds screamed above and to his four sides, a 360º circle around him, the acid continued to pelt into the tortured ground . . . but he remained untouched. Of course. Malcolm warily took a few steps forward, testing this bubble as he had once tested something similar, on an equally overcast night a long time ago. It moved with him towards the line he had seen from the hill, towards the clear skies. He wasn't about to take this brief respite for granted. He ran.   
  
But if the weather and the malevolent force behind it were truly trying to kill him, why protect him now? Why cocoon him from its own weapon, just when it had won?  
  
The answer should have hit him like phase fire. It should have . . . but because it was too simple, too obvious, it didn't.  
  
The line he had looked toward was there, like a doorway from one room to the next. He ran on under clear skies and over dry earth for a few seconds more; and then his legs buckled, and spilled him unceremoniously to the ground. There he lay, gasping, his lungs twin torches in his chest and his hand and jaw blazing fire at the gentlest, softest pressure.  
  
But he was alive. He kicked off his melted boots, peeled back his uniform to his waist to leave only the half-dry, damp-spotted undershirt in place, and laughed, at last. It erupted from his startled mouth tight as cat gut over a guitar's fret.  
  
"Go on, then!" he yelled at the seething storm mass moving off into the distance. He lay on his back, arms out at his sides, face to the sky, and although he shouted so loudly his lungs swelled and cramped in his chest, the taunt was perfectly calm. He knew what it was he spoke to. He didn't know where he was, or why he was, or what the storm wanted with him . . . but he knew how it had happened. "Go on, do your worst! You want to kill me, then kill me! Come on!"  
  
The cloud did nothing. It was hovering over the crest of the hill, and in many ways Malcolm almost felt that it was looking _down _on him; not with anger, but with incomprehension. It watched the injured, exhausted human shouting at it in a voice so much smaller than its own, watched the man laughing maniacally, and did nothing. Slowly, coiling in on itself until all that was left was a dense fist of clotted black malice, the cloud pulled back, shrank, and withdrew over the crest of the hill.   
  
And then he saw what he should have expected all along. Stark against a gunmetal skyline and cloaked with black, the figure held out one hand skyward in silent command, and the thunder sputtered its last and died in answer to the shrouded presence. The cowl slipped back and long hair streamed out in the failing wind, whipping the figure's face; but it remained motionless, making no gesture to sweep the hair away or descend the hillside toward him. Familiarity and alienation touched at his fevered skin and fell away, leaving its teasing, greasy echo.  
  
But he knew, without much feeling but a dreadful knot of something that wasn't fear in his gut, that he - or it - would. When they were ready.   
  
He had only to lie still, and wait.


End file.
